Punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, a bullet lodged in her brain, is in hospital hovering between life and death - new readers of Larsson should emphatically NOT start here. The seemingly unstoppable Ronald Niedermann, the Oddjob-like hit man from The Girl who Played with Fire,(Review) despite the best efforts of investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, is on the run; and Karl Axel Bodin, now known to be Zalachenko, a former Russian spy and Salander’s father, is recovering from his injuries, sustained in that book’s violent conclusion, just down the corridor from his unconscious daughter. Meanwhile Salander still stands accused of several murders and much else besides. The forces of both good and evil are soon assembling...
Pausing only for some reflection on the bad press (or no press at all) accorded history’s rank and file female warriors, the third and final book in the Millennium trilogy gets off to a cracking start. As the police start to put two and three together, and with the trilogy’s principal protagonist disabled in a hospital bed, it is Mikael Blomkvist that is in the driving seat, tipping off interested parties to missing pieces of the puzzle, highlighting the murky political background to key events of the books so far, whilst co-ordinating the resources of his Millennium magazine in the defence of Salander.
This is Larsson’s spy/political thriller, featuring his key theme (violence against women) alongside another close to Larsson: the gaps in the system of checks and balances that attempts to protect democratic societies everywhere. And whilst the novels lack, necessarily perhaps, the subtlety and moral ambiguity of a le Carré or Littell, (but with a wilder imagination than either), their deservedly massive popularity has contributed, I understand, to public debate on both issues in Sweden and, I would hope, elsewhere.
In two key plot strands Larsson’s own journalistic expertise is invaluable. First, when setting up the "who spies on the spies" scenario of the central part of the book, he recognises that verisimilitude demands at least a stab at the recent history of the Swedish secret services. Thus he cleverly drops in two short sections, one from the point of view of a key villain and another, 130 pages later, from one of the good guys, the head of the (real-life) Swedish department of Constitutional Protection and in which the constitutional issue is clearly outlined. There is a walk-on part for a real-life Swedish Prime Minister, as well as a (pretty incredible) meeting of Blomkvist the investigative journalist with the current (unnamed) PM. Not for nothing, perhaps, was this book’s original Swedish title Castles in the Air?
The other such strand involves another of Larsson’s female warriors - Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s occasional lover (and part-owner of Millennium), as she takes over as editor-in chief of a (fictional) Swedish conservative daily (think pre-Barclay Brothers Daily Telegraph). Larsson’s picture of the commercial pressures on newspapers (traditionally one of the checks and balances mentioned above) is entirely convincing (though, writing in 2003/4, he can be forgiven for not foreseeing the role of the internet). UK readers, particularly of our tabloid press, might be surprised to read of the reprimand to the paper’s news editor on the grounds that "opinions should be reserved for the editorial page", a principle abandoned here (for the most part) for many years. With its intimations of the death of proper investigative journalism, it is a pity that this subplot is the one most likely to be dropped from the eventual movie version...
Salander’s case, of course, remains the central concern of the book. Here (though her unusual skills again play a vital role in gathering material for her defence), her role is less prominent. There is however no shortage of other valiant rank and file female warriors. Inspector Modig is an invaluable member of the police team, as is Inspector Monica Figuerola, a key member of the Constitutional Department. She is also Blomkvist’s latest lover, another plot line that could profitably be dropped from the movie version. Most of all there is Annika Giannini, the firstly hesitant women’s rights lawyer with Salander as her first major criminal defence client. Her quietly devastating performance during the climactic scenes of the trial will have you mentally on your feet applauding.
All in all, this is a terrific book, most certainly the best of the series. In spite of the many-stranded complexity of the plot, Larsson’s control of the narrative structure and its flow is top-notch throughout. It is fast-moving, intelligent, absorbing, occasionally demanding, sometimes exasperating but always completely unputdownable.
The last chapters return the book fully to Salander, and (perhaps) dangles the prospect of further collaboration between this oddly charismatic couple. Regretfully, in the light of Larsson’s subsequent death, I must quote another writer’s novel-concluding remark, a long long time ago. "Isn’t it pretty," he wrote, "to think so."