By Stieg Larsson
My thoughts; “Eh.”
I don’t know, where does one start? I picked this book up after hearing how it was a best seller in Europe. A complex murder mystery that gripped the continent and if not for his unfortunate early demise would bring forth a novelist who would take the publishing world by storm.
After reading the five star reviews on Amazon and watching the QuickTime advertisement that provided stats that any author would envy, I sat back with a large cup of cocoa and prepared myself for a literary experience. I was excited.
The prologue didn’t disappoint. I was immediately hooked. A tired elderly old man, Henrik Vagner, is ravaged by the disappearance of his niece and the gift he has received for his eighty-second birthday, a pressed framed flower. He has been receiving this same gift, mailed from different parts of the world, on the first day of November for the past forty-three years.
The book does a great job setting itself up. We go from the prologue to the main character Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist for the muckraker magazine, Millennium. The story opens with Mikael being disgraced in the courts for libel against the Wennerstrom corporation and sentenced to a few months prison. Before he is to go to prison, he is summoned to the Vangner residence where he is hired to perform one last investigation into the disappearance of Henrik’s niece, Harriet Vagner.
We are also introduced to Lisbeth Salander, a physically and emotionally abused women who is under state controlled child custody at the age of twenty-four. In the Swedish court system, Salander has been uncooperative through her life’s traumas and thus perceived as not fit to take care of herself. She finds herself going from one legal guardian to the next. Secretly though, she turns out to be a brilliant computer hacker and quite capable of handling herself.
It is after the set-up where the book strays from its strengths. The author attempts to bring to light the suffering and abuse of women in Sweden as well as the courts and law enforcements failure to keep them protected. The introduction of this story element almost feels like an afterthought and is too important of a topic to use for subtext.
There is a completely unnecessary rape scene that the author handles abhorrently. I am not one who believes that male author’s are unable to accurately portray female characters in their story’s, but Stieg Larsson is a shining example of why that perception exist.
To have one of the main characters suffer a rape and then handle it with a quick revenge sequence, followed by no real emotional impact to the character in question demonstrates a man’s inability to understand just what impact rape has on women. The story didn’t need this element and the credibility of the character was completely lost for me.
It was at this point where the excitement to read on, was replaced by the urge to close the book. Yet, I continued on.
Mikael can’t seem to keep his “manhood” in his pants for very long and we find that he strolls into one sexual relationship after another. Again, there is no consequence for this behavior. Thus, there is no reason for it in the story other than to fulfill the author’s sexual fantasies, unless of course it’s perfectly normal in Sweden to go around screwing your neighbor, married or not.
The author sets up corporate corruption, but really it’s never delved into and has absolutely nothing to do with main mystery of the story. As a matter of fact, most plot elements don’t intertwine at all. The author has a lot he wants to tell, but he keeps all these elements separate. Again, he takes you out of one story and puts you into another. This left me frustrated as a reader.
It is while writing the mystery the Larsoon is at his best. I found myself really captured by Mikael’s quest to find out what happened to Harriet. It was fun going on the journey of discovery as he tracks down the clues that lead him to the conclusion. Unfortunately Mikael isn’t the prime mover of the story and, as in many failed mysteries, the villain has to reveal himself to the protagonist in order to be discovered and taken down, which by the way is a very depraved plot line. Disturbing and odd in its truth, this plot line did not fit into the overall feel of the book. It was as if Hannibal Lecter took over for a couple of chapters. A sexually deviant Hannibal Lecter.
What is odd, is that the Antagonist (if you want to call him that) is taken down almost one hundred and fifty pages before the end of the novel. I found myself asking, is the mystery over? There is so much book left, what twist is going to come out of this? What curve ball is the author going to give that makes me say, “Of course, how didn’t I see that coming?”
But that never happens. Instead the last hundred and fifty pages covers a caper plot that redeems Mikael against the Wennerstrom Corporation. A man we never really see and of whom we know nothing about. I found myself skimming through the last pages uninterested and just waiting for it to end.
If you like mysteries there are much better books out there. If you like stories about double cross, go read another.
Just skip this one.
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