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Book review: Girl with a Dragon Tattoo


We've spent so much collective time, these last few years, poring over business news and picking apart front-page articles as we try to understand Our Ongoing Financial Crisis. The sheer attempt to understand, to pull out why our friends were laid off and our health plans stripped bare, is a real effort to peer into what seems a dim and twisted world.

This is why the great advantage of The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo is its setting. Modern-day and solidly on-planet, the first of Stieg Larsson's much-lauded masterpieces is a murder mystery wrapped up in a thick layer of corporate intrigue. Though the action concerns twenty-first century Sweden, Larsson's clear prose as seen through Reg Keeland's crisp translation makes accessible what a hundred times the paper spent in the New York Times has not: the shady world of international business fraud. And yet, the antics of the Wennerström Group (Larsson's Enron, Halliburton, and Blackwater all in one) are neither the main plot nor the abiding moral message: they're the backdrop. Girl With A Dragon Tattoo feels viscerally real, almost to the point of a true-story docudrama, partly because neither author nor characters are allowed to forget the global turmoil directly beyond their doorstep. The difference between Girl and such a docu-drama is only that the latter rarely achieves Girl's authenticity.

In front of all this corporate collapse comes the central storyline: the hunt for answers to a murder mystery left unsolved since 1966. The drama of the Vanger family's mystifying past is not shied from or played down; rather, it's hammed up with complete awareness of the tropes into which it falls. Our leading detective himself, the hard-hitting financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, recognizes his challenge as "a locked-room murder in island format." Because this figure of modern-day business sense is both drawn into the Agatha-Christie drama and convinced by it, the reader is pulled along. And into this unlikely but intriguing mix comes Lisbeth Salander, tying the whole narrative together only to blast it apart.

Salander supplies the protagonist, expository device, and underlying social themes all in one. The bemusing thing about Girl With A Dragon Tattoo is that it feels almost as if it could have been written without the Girl; it would have been a man's book, dealt with the dichotomy of personal and corporate crime, and left all women in the passive, victimised role. Instead it is this complex tripartite mobile; when one section of the plot should move along, all others react according to a natural path. More often than not it is Lisbeth moving, driving the plot to her frenetic pace and running the men ragged.

At its heart Girl is a book about violence against women, systematic and unpunished, executed in the gaps between explicit societal prohibition – that is to say, everywhere impunity may be assumed by a sufficiently ruthless and sadistic mind. Lisbeth and Mikael find it in every corner of this story – and though Blomkvist, in his privileged position as an employed and respected middle-aged white male, would rather not see the worst his fellow men have to offer, Salander zeroes in on every brutality and every rape with single-minded purpose. She forces him, and us, to watch and to think, and to acknowledge the truth of the statistics posted before each section:

Forty-six percent of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man.

Ninety-two percent of the women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police.


Worth noting. While reinforcing this direct text, Larsson achieves a distinct rarity in modern fiction: he writes sex scenes not even the slightest bit titillating or pornographic. One of them is cut up and interspersed with a rape. There is no pleasure to be had from the words. The author's commentary is expressed without words; it's impossible to read this passage and not hear it.

That said, both author and protagonist stop short of the obvious conclusion: they do not tie violence against women into corporate corruption, don't draw any parallels in the minds of the perpetrators or illustrate the negative trend as following from a male-dominated aspect of prevailing corporate culture. The connection is there to be made, but in the end, it's left untouched.

Lisbeth's own past remains only hinted; some material had to be left for the sequel. But I won't read the second volume to find out what set Salander on her path. I'll read it because Larsson has earned my trust, and my amazement, in his candid presentation of complex systems and harrowing truths that exist here, now, today.

Girl With A Dragon Tattoo! It's amazing. Read it. Be aware that it's not an escape. The only thing escapist about this novel is the way the woman achieves her victory: complete, brutal, and without compromise.

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Arkster

January 2012

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