When people saw me reading this book, I was repeatedly told, “It starts off slowly, but stick with it – it gets much better.” As someone who devoured every delicious word of the text, I can’t fathom how anyone could conclude this book was slow!
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the first in Stieg Larsson’s so-called “Millenium” series, has all the requisite pieces of a riveting noir thriller. Mikael Blomkvist, a down-on-his luck reporter is about to do jail time for libel after publishing an unsubstantiated account of corporate corruption. The publicity around the case, as well as Blomkvist’s eye for investigative journalism, attracts the attention on Henrik Vanger, an aged tycoon who’s obsessed with the bizarre disappearance of his niece some 40 years ago. Vanger hires Blomkvist to take another shot at solving the cold case and uncovering who among his dysfunctional family could have kidnapped and/or murdered the young girl.
And we’re off to the races!
Once Blomkvist starts digging, the book begins a page-turning investigation into the Vanger family and a gruesome series of torture rape/murders in the Swedish countryside that are all linked by their – spoiler alert – Old Testament-style cruelty. Fascism, incest, misogyny, and mental illness all factor heavily in the tale, and are revealed in bombshell moments that keep the novel humming and the thrill factor taut.
While the plot is great, the real gem is the character of Lisbeth Salandar, a 24-year old hacker and part-time investigator. When Blomkvist hires Salandar to begin working the Vanger case with him, we get to know this girl with the dragon tattoo, who stands out as one of the most compelling and best-written female characters in recent fiction. A punk rock version of Amelie, Salander is an antisocial pixie, a feminist, a sometime lesbian, and a full-time troublemaker. But none of these archetypical attributes falls into the realm of cliché, and Salandar emerges as a richly complicated, fully formed person who jumps out of the pages with her middle finger raised and a “fuck you” scowl on her face.
It is through Salander that we get the book’s subplot involving our heroine and her pervy legal “guardian,” which brings the brutality of the rape/murders she’s investigating to her own back yard. But unlike the women of the countryside, little Lisbeth has a penchant for revenge, and the scene where she settles the score makes it clear that she’s nobody’s victim and has every right to her contemptuous, antisocial attitude
The novel isn't perfect - Blomkvist is disingenuous as a feminist who's disturbed at the treatment of women in Sweden, yet not feminist enough to avoid using every female character for sex. Moreover, the book winds down in an anticlimax that, after hundreds of pages of originality, reads like Larsson was less interested in a strong finish than just getting to the end. I found it fairly easy to overlook the conflicting sketch of Blomkvist because Salandar was such an amazing study in character development. And I forgave the ending in light of the fascinating dual plots of the Vanger case and Salandar's revenge. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo probably will not make it into the literary cannon, but most certainly presents the reader with highly memorable scenes and characters that more than live up to its hype.
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