Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy
Feb. 2nd, 2010 03:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustI have read my way through these three books - each comfortably over 500 pages, each longer than the last - with a mixture of fascination and exasperation. It took me a while to start reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: it was hugely successful in sales terms, but that's no guide to whether I'll enjoy a book; then ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
durham_rambler read and praised it, and I picked it up, read the first page and reflected once again that our tastes are not the same. Finally I started hearing it praised by people whose book recommendations carried more weight - and also heard criticisms of the translation, suggestions that this was why the book and had not won more awards. Well, I wasn't going to learn Swedish to read the thing in the original, better try again.
With persistence, I became quite hooked by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. For what the opinion of a non-Swedish speaker is worth, I don't think that the fault is entirely Reg Keeland's. His translation may be pedestrian (and he has some curious mannerisms: a fondness for intrusive full stops, as in 'U.R.L.', for example, or 'Cold Warmonger'where 'Cold Warrior' is more usual) but the infodumps, the obsession with brand names, these are surely the author's own. No-one ever just has a computer, they have "the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerP.C.7451 processor with anAltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 megs of R.A.M. and a sixty-gig hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in C.D. and D.V.D. burners. [This goes on for a couple more paragraphs]" This particular example is admittedly the object of Salander's desires, and she is a geek, but even so. The plot repeatedly stops for two or three pages of explanation about Guardianship law, or high finance, or recent Swedish history: if this were SF, the author would be doing their utmost to hide the pill of necessary background information in a spoonful of jam, but Larsson (Stig of the Infodump) just stops and tells us things he thinks we ought to know. Even I - and I don't have a problem with slow narrative - was muttering "Oh, get on with it!" Yet whatever Larsson is doing right is enough to make his glacial pacing acceptable to a mass readership.
What he is doing right, the satisfied customers tell us, is the character of Lisbeth Salander. The English-language publishers certainly thought so, changing the titles of the first and third volumes to align with the second, The Girl Who Played With Fire, the only book of the three whose English title is a direct translation from the Swedish. Men Who Hate Women and The Air Castle that Blew Up have quite a different emphasis, inviting the reader to see the character of Lisbeth Salander as no more central to the books than their political concerns - and maybe even the character who pursues political ends, the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Larsson has been quoted as saying that Lisbeth Salander is Pippi Longstocking, as she might have grown up; Blomkvist is, explicitly in the text, a less well-known character from the works of Astrid Lindgren, the boy detective Kalle Blomkvist. In other respects, he's a bit of a Mary Sue: successful, principled, charming (especially to women). He is also quite left-wing: maybe not as much so as his creator, but I was certainly cheering for him by the end of book one when, having caused a financial crash by his exposé of a crooked financier, he explains that the Stock Exchange, which makes nothing but money, is not synonymous with the economy, and if it plummets, well, "it doesn't matter at all." (Original date of publication: 2005).
Salander is the opposite of charming: tiny but fierce, taciturn, prickly, she hides her intelligence and abilities. I've said that she shares the spotlight with Blomkvist, and it's true, but this can be frustrating. She is off-stage for much of The Girl Who Played With Fire, and I was impatient to get back to her, impatient beyond the sense of suspense proper to a thriller. The overarching plot of the trio of books is the revelation and development of her character: who is she, what made her this way, what will she become? On the one hand she has the curious legal status of being in guardianship, treated as incompetent to make her own decisions, despite being an adult; on the other she is secretly extremely intelligent (there is a suggestion that she solves Fermat's Last Theorem*). She has a photographic memory and, ashelenraven put it, the superpower of computer hacking. At first I was sceptical about this last: was it really possible to gain the sort of access she enjoyed? Then I realised that the real question was not whether it is theoretically possible, but whether it benefits the story to have a character holding this sort of 'get out of everything free' card? She is also a very effective fighter (partly because she is completely ruthless). She has principles, and sticks to them, but they are principles of her own, not necessarily anyone else's. Evidently these characteristics result in part from her history, her traumatic childhood and its equally traumatic outcome; but where most people would be crushed, Lisbeth Salander fights back. She is remarkably strong-willed; it is (but only, I think, once) suggested that she may be to some extent autistic.
This is something which might have become clearer had Larsson not died before completing his projected ten book series. I started out referring to the books as a 'trilogy', because that's what it says on the cover - but in fact that's a misnomer, and made me critical of the books because I had misunderstood their construction. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tells the self-contained story of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger; but it also introduces aspects of Lisbeth Salander's life which don't make sense, and feel like flaws in the story, but are actually teasers for the books which follow. The Girl Who Played With Fire at first appears to be a murder mystery: a researcher and a journalist working for Millennium magazine have been murdered, and Salander is suspected by the police. There's very little actual mystery: the question is not who committed the murder, but why, and how Salander is connected with it. (I think we're told enough for the answer to this last question to be pretty obvious, and the big reveal fell very flat: yet I scruple to spoiler it here). By the end of the volume, these questions have been answered, but the Swedish intelligence service has been depicted in a way that makes Peter Wright's Spycatcher look like a model of good sense and moderation. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest is almost entirely devoted to unravelling this. Even so, there are questions it leaves unanswered: all three books refer to Lisbeth's sister Camilla, for example, but she remains a story yet to be told.
I wondered about her, but I wondered even more about Lisbeth Salander: who would she have become by the end of the story? The narrative, as far as we have it, starts a process of undoing the things that make her unlike anyone else. The books all emphasise that she looks like an adolescent, although she is in her twenties, and initially she lives like a perpetual adolescent in an untidy bedroom (in fact the flat where she grew up) dressing in a series of T-shirts with well chosen slogans, pierced and tattooed, living on pizza. Then something happens, she falls in love and comes by some money, and she turns into a woman with a classic taste in clothing and an expensive property of which she occupies only a corner, but tidily. By the end of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest she is agreeing to try someone else's strategy, even starting to say 'thank you' to people. She is beginning to mellow, and to become more feminine. Along with her purchase of a more adult wardrobe, she loses a tattoo and acquires a pair of discreetly enlarged breasts. The obliteration of the tattoo is rationalised: it is altogether too distinctive for someone who may want to pass unnoticed, or disguised. The bust enlargement is prefigured by an episode in which Salander dons - rather less discreet - false breasts as part of a disguise, and evidently enjoys it, the implication is that she makes the change to please herself, rather than to sppeal to others or to conform to any external idea of how she should look. And yet...** The taming of Lisbeth Salander has the potential to make her a happier, but a less interesting character.
The overall stance of the books is overtly feminist: 'Men Who Hate Women' are top of Salander's list of enemies. Indeed, the lectures on feminism, particularly in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, are another thing that I'm quite surprised Larsson gets away with. Each section of the book is prefaced with information on women soldiers through history, from the Amazons to the Fon of Dahomey. Many of the characters are women, and this includes rôles in which women in Britain, at least (maybe things are different in Sweden) are underrepresented: doctors, journalists (and editors), lawyers, security consultants, police (including detectives) and secret services. It's fun to see women positively depicted in positions of authority; but it creates a degree of imbalance, because the women are likely to be the ones who get it right, are not fooled or corrupted, while the villains are all (really? all? as far as I can recall) men. There are reasons for this: they may be the old guard, who wouldn't accept women among their number, or simple thugs (who may, indeed, be out-fought by women) hired as muscle - but for whatever reasons, women are more often right and men more often not. The one exception to this is Erika Berger, who spends most of the third book going to pieces - and again, I wonder what her complete story arc would have been.
There are other things I could say. I take issue with a number of elements of the plot, for example. But - asmatociquala points out, it's not about what a writer does wrong, it's about what they are doing right. And clearly Stieg Larsson is doing something right. When I finished The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I was impatient for more: that's got to count as a success. By the time I reached the end of The Girl Who Played With Fire, I admit, I was disinclined to pursue the story further, but once a copy of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest came into the house, I picked it up, grumpily at first, and then increasingly gripped by it. After 1600 pages, I could have been suffering from Stockholm syndrome - but I'm inclined to give Larsson credit for writing some extremely effective page-turners.
*SPOILER: but the one piece of damage done by a bullet in her brain is the obliteration of her solution. Hmm...
** Yes, I know, I'm old-fashioned about cosmetic surgery. Perhaps I'm over-reacting.
durham_rambler read and praised it, and I picked it up, read the first page and reflected once again that our tastes are not the same. Finally I started hearing it praised by people whose book recommendations carried more weight - and also heard criticisms of the translation, suggestions that this was why the book and had not won more awards. Well, I wasn't going to learn Swedish to read the thing in the original, better try again. With persistence, I became quite hooked by The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. For what the opinion of a non-Swedish speaker is worth, I don't think that the fault is entirely Reg Keeland's. His translation may be pedestrian (and he has some curious mannerisms: a fondness for intrusive full stops, as in 'U.R.L.', for example, or 'Cold Warmonger'where 'Cold Warrior' is more usual) but the infodumps, the obsession with brand names, these are surely the author's own. No-one ever just has a computer, they have "the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerP.C.7451 processor with anAltiVec Velocity Engine, 960 megs of R.A.M. and a sixty-gig hard drive. It had BlueTooth and built-in C.D. and D.V.D. burners. [This goes on for a couple more paragraphs]" This particular example is admittedly the object of Salander's desires, and she is a geek, but even so. The plot repeatedly stops for two or three pages of explanation about Guardianship law, or high finance, or recent Swedish history: if this were SF, the author would be doing their utmost to hide the pill of necessary background information in a spoonful of jam, but Larsson (Stig of the Infodump) just stops and tells us things he thinks we ought to know. Even I - and I don't have a problem with slow narrative - was muttering "Oh, get on with it!" Yet whatever Larsson is doing right is enough to make his glacial pacing acceptable to a mass readership.
What he is doing right, the satisfied customers tell us, is the character of Lisbeth Salander. The English-language publishers certainly thought so, changing the titles of the first and third volumes to align with the second, The Girl Who Played With Fire, the only book of the three whose English title is a direct translation from the Swedish. Men Who Hate Women and The Air Castle that Blew Up have quite a different emphasis, inviting the reader to see the character of Lisbeth Salander as no more central to the books than their political concerns - and maybe even the character who pursues political ends, the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist. Larsson has been quoted as saying that Lisbeth Salander is Pippi Longstocking, as she might have grown up; Blomkvist is, explicitly in the text, a less well-known character from the works of Astrid Lindgren, the boy detective Kalle Blomkvist. In other respects, he's a bit of a Mary Sue: successful, principled, charming (especially to women). He is also quite left-wing: maybe not as much so as his creator, but I was certainly cheering for him by the end of book one when, having caused a financial crash by his exposé of a crooked financier, he explains that the Stock Exchange, which makes nothing but money, is not synonymous with the economy, and if it plummets, well, "it doesn't matter at all." (Original date of publication: 2005).
Salander is the opposite of charming: tiny but fierce, taciturn, prickly, she hides her intelligence and abilities. I've said that she shares the spotlight with Blomkvist, and it's true, but this can be frustrating. She is off-stage for much of The Girl Who Played With Fire, and I was impatient to get back to her, impatient beyond the sense of suspense proper to a thriller. The overarching plot of the trio of books is the revelation and development of her character: who is she, what made her this way, what will she become? On the one hand she has the curious legal status of being in guardianship, treated as incompetent to make her own decisions, despite being an adult; on the other she is secretly extremely intelligent (there is a suggestion that she solves Fermat's Last Theorem*). She has a photographic memory and, as
helenraven put it, the superpower of computer hacking. At first I was sceptical about this last: was it really possible to gain the sort of access she enjoyed? Then I realised that the real question was not whether it is theoretically possible, but whether it benefits the story to have a character holding this sort of 'get out of everything free' card? She is also a very effective fighter (partly because she is completely ruthless). She has principles, and sticks to them, but they are principles of her own, not necessarily anyone else's. Evidently these characteristics result in part from her history, her traumatic childhood and its equally traumatic outcome; but where most people would be crushed, Lisbeth Salander fights back. She is remarkably strong-willed; it is (but only, I think, once) suggested that she may be to some extent autistic.This is something which might have become clearer had Larsson not died before completing his projected ten book series. I started out referring to the books as a 'trilogy', because that's what it says on the cover - but in fact that's a misnomer, and made me critical of the books because I had misunderstood their construction. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo tells the self-contained story of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger; but it also introduces aspects of Lisbeth Salander's life which don't make sense, and feel like flaws in the story, but are actually teasers for the books which follow. The Girl Who Played With Fire at first appears to be a murder mystery: a researcher and a journalist working for Millennium magazine have been murdered, and Salander is suspected by the police. There's very little actual mystery: the question is not who committed the murder, but why, and how Salander is connected with it. (I think we're told enough for the answer to this last question to be pretty obvious, and the big reveal fell very flat: yet I scruple to spoiler it here). By the end of the volume, these questions have been answered, but the Swedish intelligence service has been depicted in a way that makes Peter Wright's Spycatcher look like a model of good sense and moderation. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest is almost entirely devoted to unravelling this. Even so, there are questions it leaves unanswered: all three books refer to Lisbeth's sister Camilla, for example, but she remains a story yet to be told.
I wondered about her, but I wondered even more about Lisbeth Salander: who would she have become by the end of the story? The narrative, as far as we have it, starts a process of undoing the things that make her unlike anyone else. The books all emphasise that she looks like an adolescent, although she is in her twenties, and initially she lives like a perpetual adolescent in an untidy bedroom (in fact the flat where she grew up) dressing in a series of T-shirts with well chosen slogans, pierced and tattooed, living on pizza. Then something happens, she falls in love and comes by some money, and she turns into a woman with a classic taste in clothing and an expensive property of which she occupies only a corner, but tidily. By the end of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest she is agreeing to try someone else's strategy, even starting to say 'thank you' to people. She is beginning to mellow, and to become more feminine. Along with her purchase of a more adult wardrobe, she loses a tattoo and acquires a pair of discreetly enlarged breasts. The obliteration of the tattoo is rationalised: it is altogether too distinctive for someone who may want to pass unnoticed, or disguised. The bust enlargement is prefigured by an episode in which Salander dons - rather less discreet - false breasts as part of a disguise, and evidently enjoys it, the implication is that she makes the change to please herself, rather than to sppeal to others or to conform to any external idea of how she should look. And yet...** The taming of Lisbeth Salander has the potential to make her a happier, but a less interesting character.
The overall stance of the books is overtly feminist: 'Men Who Hate Women' are top of Salander's list of enemies. Indeed, the lectures on feminism, particularly in The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, are another thing that I'm quite surprised Larsson gets away with. Each section of the book is prefaced with information on women soldiers through history, from the Amazons to the Fon of Dahomey. Many of the characters are women, and this includes rôles in which women in Britain, at least (maybe things are different in Sweden) are underrepresented: doctors, journalists (and editors), lawyers, security consultants, police (including detectives) and secret services. It's fun to see women positively depicted in positions of authority; but it creates a degree of imbalance, because the women are likely to be the ones who get it right, are not fooled or corrupted, while the villains are all (really? all? as far as I can recall) men. There are reasons for this: they may be the old guard, who wouldn't accept women among their number, or simple thugs (who may, indeed, be out-fought by women) hired as muscle - but for whatever reasons, women are more often right and men more often not. The one exception to this is Erika Berger, who spends most of the third book going to pieces - and again, I wonder what her complete story arc would have been.
There are other things I could say. I take issue with a number of elements of the plot, for example. But - as
matociquala points out, it's not about what a writer does wrong, it's about what they are doing right. And clearly Stieg Larsson is doing something right. When I finished The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, I was impatient for more: that's got to count as a success. By the time I reached the end of The Girl Who Played With Fire, I admit, I was disinclined to pursue the story further, but once a copy of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest came into the house, I picked it up, grumpily at first, and then increasingly gripped by it. After 1600 pages, I could have been suffering from Stockholm syndrome - but I'm inclined to give Larsson credit for writing some extremely effective page-turners. *SPOILER: but the one piece of damage done by a bullet in her brain is the obliteration of her solution. Hmm...
** Yes, I know, I'm old-fashioned about cosmetic surgery. Perhaps I'm over-reacting.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 05:41 pm (UTC)Is it in line with Lisbeth's other body modifications, like her numerous piercings and tattooed, or is it treated as different by the text?
no subject
Date: 2010-02-02 09:35 pm (UTC)