Sweden’s bad men

The late Stieg Larsson concludes his addictive
though maddening Millennium trilogy
with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

It’s a pity Stieg Larsson’s concluding volume to his Millennium trilogy isn’t as interesting as the back story behind it. In 2004, Larsson, a left-wing Swedish journalist, completed the first three of a planned series of 10 novels. After delivering the manuscripts to his Swedish publisher, he promptly dropped dead, the victim of a massive heart attack brought on by his heavy smoking and poor eating habits. His books, however, lived on. Did they ever: since publication, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and now, with a belated North American release, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, have sold an estimated 27 million copies worldwide. They’ve been made into movies in Sweden, and Brad Pitt is in charge of the American remake. Not bad for a once obscure lefty hack.

The trilogy’s premise was always intriguing, if dotted with familiar tropes: a crusading journalist, corrupt bureaucrats, sinister Russians, honest cops and rogue intelligence agents. But what carries it is the central figure, the titular Girl, Lisbeth Salander. A bisexual, anti-social, computer-hacking pixie, Salander is also a very angry, very vengeful young woman, adept at wielding a tattoo gun, a golf club, a Taser or delivering a swift kick to the balls of the men who threaten her (and they are always men—more on this later) without a trace of hesitation. As a character, she is rich, complex and enjoyable.

The same can’t be said of Larsson’s male co-protagonist, the dogged magazine reporter Mikael Blomkvist. Blomkvist is, in a word, a bore. He doesn’t drink much, doesn’t smoke much and throws himself into his work. He does drink a lot of coffee and sleeps around, but, being a very modern European, has little time for quaint conventions like monogamy, much less tedious affairs like jealousy or possessiveness. He is the very model of post-war Europe: statist, egalitarian, moralizing.

Which brings us to the trilogy’s politics, which are unabashedly left. Dragon Tattoo’s original Swedish title translates into Men Who Hate Women, wisely changed by Larsson’s English-language publisher to something snappier. Through Blomkvist, whom Salon.com’s Laura Miller calls Larsson’s “authorial sock puppet,” Larsson attacks the systemic sexism of Swedish society (and who knew Swedish society, of all societies, was systemically sexist?) with a verve that is almost pathological. He makes his point early and often. Very often—so much so that it begins to grate, like a hectoring second-year Women’s Studies student. His stridency also takes the novels down pointless digressions that add little to the central plot and work only as opportunities for the author to wag a castigating finger at men who abuse their power and authority over women.

Which would be tolerable if the prose was brisk. But too often it’s leaden and flat. Reading vague descriptions about someone’s lunch is no more entertaining in a novel than it is on Facebook, yet Larsson is sure to mention a meal consisting of a meatball sandwich and beet salad—which is at least better than one character’s “late but nutritious dinner.”

Whether the translator or the author is at fault is at this point irrelevant. The ham-fisted prose is jarring enough to turn off readers, which is a shame, as Larsson has written three genuine page-turners for those with the patience for the slog. At their best, the books are tightly plotted when staying on the central story, with action, sex, international finance and skullduggery at the highest levels of the Swedish establishment. But too often the reader gets the impression that Larsson is using his characters to vent at an unjust world and an uncaring government.

The trilogy has parts, many of them, that border on great storytelling, despite the gaping plot holes and the expository tedium. But its concluding volume is the weakest, bogged down by indignant lefty righteousness and a surplus of board meetings. It may be no small irony that, for this runaway European bestselling series, its flaws are so overwhelmingly European.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S
NEST, BY STIEG LARSSON, VIKING
CANADA, HC, 566 PP, $32