Author: Stieg Larsson · Published: 2005 · Genre: Crime Thriller, Nordic Noir · Original title: Män som hatar kvinnor
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is two books in one: a classic closed-circle mystery on a family island and a crusading story about corporate corruption and violence against women. The mystery is excellent, and Lisbeth Salander is one of the great characters of modern crime fiction. It is also too long, clumsy in places and graphic. Worth reading if you can get through a slow opening and some disturbing scenes.
What it’s about Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist and co-owner of the Stockholm magazine Millennium, has just lost a libel case brought by the financier Hans-Erik Wennerström. With his reputation in tatters, he accepts an odd commission from Henrik Vanger, the elderly former head of a powerful industrial family. Officially, Blomkvist will write the family history. Really, he is to find out what happened to Henrik’s great-niece Harriet, who vanished from the family’s island, Hedeby, in 1966, on a day when an accident blocked the only bridge to the mainland. Every year since, Henrik has received a pressed flower on his birthday.
Running alongside is Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant, antisocial researcher and hacker who works for Milton Security and lives under a legal guardianship. Her new guardian, the lawyer Nils Bjurman, abuses his power over her, and her response is one of the book’s most talked-about and hardest-to-read threads. Eventually she and Blomkvist join forces on the Vanger case.
What works – Salander. Fierce, private and ethical on her own terms, she dominates every scene she is in. Her research skills make the investigation plausible, and her refusal to be anyone’s victim is the book’s emotional core. – The cold case. Once the Vanger investigation gets going, it is a first-rate puzzle, full of old photographs, a cryptic notebook and a family tree packed with grudges and wartime Nazi sympathies. Watching Blomkvist reconstruct a single day in 1966 from photographs is terrific. – Research as action. Much of the investigation is people reading archives, company records and old newspapers, and Larsson makes that absorbing. The book is, among other things, a love letter to dogged investigative journalism. – Anger. Larsson was a journalist who spent years investigating the Swedish far right, and he writes with real fury about the abuse of power. The Swedish title, which translates as Men Who Hate Women, states the theme plainly.
What doesn’t The opening is a slog through financial journalism and backstory before the mystery starts. The prose is flat, and there is endless detail about coffee, sandwiches and computer hardware. Blomkvist is an obvious author stand-in whom almost every woman finds irresistible, and the final stretch, after the main mystery is resolved, returns to the Wennerström plot and feels like a long epilogue.
The violence is the more serious issue. The book condemns sexual violence, but it also depicts it in detail, and critics have asked whether a novel can denounce abuse while dwelling on it so closely. Readers will reach different answers, but it is a fair question.
There is also a sad story behind the book. Larsson died in 2004, before it came out, and never saw its success. Because he left no valid will and was not married to his partner of three decades, Eva Gabrielsson, his estate went to his father and brother. Gabrielsson later opposed the continuation novels by David Lagercrantz that the estate authorised. None of that changes the text, but it colours how many readers see the series.
Who should read it Readers who like cold-case mysteries and do not mind length, and anyone curious about the book that turned Nordic noir into a global genre. If detailed sexual violence is a hard limit for you, skip it or go in carefully.
Rating: 3.5/5
Photo credits — Featured image: Photo by B (tenpoundhammer) via Flickr, CC BY 2.0, cropped.
