Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Translated by Reg Keeland, Vantage, 2009.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was one of those books I felt I had to read. It was very popular and got great reviews. I wanted to see what it was all about.
It is a riveting story. Journalist Mikael Blomkvist has just been found guilty of libel for an article he wrote about a prominent Swedish entrepreneur, one Hans Wennerström. The year is 2002. Just as he was resigning from being publisher of his magazine, the Millennium, he was offered an interesting assignment.
Another prominent businessman, now largely retired, Henrik Vanger will pay him a handsome sum if he works for him for a year. He has two things he would like him to do: (1) Look into the disappearance and apparent murder of his grandniece Harriet Vanger in 1966, and (2) Interview relatives and examine family records to write a history of the Vanger family, five generations of industrial success and wealth.
Henrik lives a day’s trip north of Stockholm on an island off a small coastal town. He has an estate there, and a few relatives live in the adjacent village. Mikael will live in a cottage on the estate. He looks over the files and photos Henrik has collected and begins his own queries.
The day seventeen-year-old Harriet disappeared was a holiday in town. It was also a time when the whole extended family (over fifty people then) got together. The last photos of Harriet were of her watching the holiday parade. To complicate things, there was a traffic accident on the bridge going to Herr Vanger’s island. There were many photos of both the parade and the accident.
Of course, the events happened 46 years before, but Blomkvist is able to track down many of the people in the photos, and he notices a few things other people have missed. So part of the story describes some fascinating sleuthing.
Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, would have been called a Goth in the United States. She indeed has a few tattoos, dresses in black with short hair dyed black, and shows various piercings. She keeps to herself and few people know much about her. She does contract work for a private detective who is always impressed with the thoroughness of her background checks.
That is how Blomkvist finds out about Salander. Henrik Vanger had the detective agency do a background check on Blomkvist before he hired him. When Blomkvist sees the report, he is impressed with how thorough it is. No one, he thinks, even his ex-wife, knows all this. So he hires Lisbeth Salander to help him in his research to find out what happened to Harriet Vanger.
The story of how they learn what happened to Harriet leads to the main plot. We also learn about Lisbeth’s life. Though twenty-four, she is still a ward of the state. Her new legal guardian is, to put it mildly, an unscrupulous lawyer. Lisbeth has learned not to trust anyone in authority. She seems to have her own way of dealing with crimes and injustices. The story is ingenious and clever as well.
Larsson clearly believes in Chekhov’s gun. I was able to correctly guess (at least broadly) what happened to Harriet about a third of the way through the story. A little more than halfway, I was able to deduce that another crime had happened. Neither one of those correct guesses detracted from the story at all. Larsson has the reader in his grip.
The story is not for everyone. There is a lot of sex. Some it is criminal, some is consensual, but one begins to get the idea that Swedes are obsessed with it. There are also a lot of Vangers. I had to refer to the family tree printed near the front of the book several times.
It turns out there are a lot of crimes. Harriet’s disappearance is just the tip of the iceberg. Much of the tale, then, is psychological. We learn something about why Lisbeth is the way she is and, maybe, get some insight into people who tend to Aspergers. We also get into the minds of some pretty crafty and maybe creepy criminals. If The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is your cup of tea, you will drink every drop.
The Swedish title is very different, Men Who Hate Women. (Blomkvist is not one of them.) At one point Salander makes an interesting observation. She is doing a background check not related to the Vangers and learns that the man she is checking made a girlfriend get an abortion. She mutters, “One more man who hates women” (547). In the United States abortion is often seen as favoring women, but here Salander has it right. The chauvinist pigs want to avoid responsibility. The women are stuck. Some things are universal.