Tangled Web UK Review January 2009
The Girl Who Played with Fire by
Stieg Larsson
pbk out July 09
(Maclehose Press)
at £7.99
Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a dazzling combination of classic detective story and serial killer thriller. The second book of the Millenium trilogy takes on another of the traditional tropes of the crime thriller: the race to clear the name of an individual seemingly inextricably implicated in what becomes a notorious crime.
That individual, you won’t be surprised to hear, given the new book’s title, is Larsson’s punk heroine, Lisbeth Salander. Financed by the funds she expropriated in the previous book, she has retreated (via Rome, Genoa and Miami) to Grenada in the Caribbean, where she studies mathematics (particularly Fermat’s Last Theorem) over a Carib beer, whilst acquiring a (temporary) boyfriend and seizing the opportunity to dispense natural justice to a wife-beating husband during a handy major hurricane. Advocat Nils Erik Bjurman, Salander’s guardian and rapist, meanwhile plots to remove the hold Salander has over him, whilst Mikael Blomkvist, back in harness at Millennium, his campaigning magazine, is on the brink of publishing a special issue (and a supporting book) covering the trafficking of women to work in the Swedish sex trade.
It’s a promising start, expertly combining key characters, plot strands and themes from Book One. The writing is again pacy and invigorating, moving swiftly from scene to scene with great confidence. The style (highly readable in Reg Keeland’s fluid translation), and deriving, I guess, from Larsson’s own investigations, is documentary to the point of obsession. Few computer specifications go unlisted, the theories of both Pythagoras and Pierre de Fermat are explored at some length and when Salander returns to Stockholm and starts to furnish her new flat, we spend a page or so with the current Ikea catalogue.
Then
several murders occur in central Stockholm. What follows is a superbly plotted and well-structured fast-moving thriller which intertwines three separate investigations: that of the police into the central murders (teamwork exhaustively logged), that of Blomkvist, concerned that the police are barking up the wrong tree, and that by Salander herself, still keeping Blomkvist at arms length, continually evading the police whilst following developments by hacking into appropriate (and inappropriate) computers.
Some caveats: Larsson is in full-on thriller mode for the last two thirds of this book. Thus whilst he has fun with the creation of one of thrillerdom’s stock villains, an apparently unstoppable combination of OddJob and the Terminator (both sources explicitly acknowledged), the sex trade story (and the mathematics, save for a credulity-stretching revelation later in the story) largely go out of the window. But as the missing pieces of the horrific life of the still intriguing Salander finally fall into place, and as the book gallops to its exhausting conclusion, few readers of the first novel will feel short-changed.
As in Book One, there is much unfinished business as this volume comes to an end. It is as well to remember that this book is one of three, delivered together as a manuscript, and therefore conceived and carefully structured as an entity. I guess, for instance, that the Millennium exposure of the Swedish sex trade and its support mechanisms will form the core of the final novel. Then, having exorcised the ghosts of Agatha Christie, Ed McBain and Ian Fleming, perhaps Book Three will reveal more of the real Stieg Larsson. I look forward to finding out.
(
Bob Cornwell
)
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