The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – Boris Hinderer

Book Review >>> Boris Hinderer The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Stieg Larsson. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. 600 pp.

It feels like every book store I’ve walked into during the last couple months has featured a ziggurat built of Stieg Larsson’s internationally-bestselling novel, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Due to all the hype, I half suspected it to be some sort of epic on a scale with War and Peace. In reality, however, the novel is a fun and intriguing mystery about defamed journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his investigation into the disappearance of Harriet Vanger, a scion from a family of wealthy and sinister industrialists. Interwoven into this primary plotline are two secondary plots. The first involves the nature of Blomkvist’s recent libel conviction and his war against corporate corruption. The second is about the investigator-savant and ward of the state, Lisbeth Salander. Salander (who has a dragon tattoo) is an enigmatic figure, and the sections of the book dedicated to following her narrative hint that she has spent time in a psychiatric ward and has had problems with the police. She is described as going around “with the attitude that she would rather be beaten to death than take any shit. And she always [gets] revenge” (Larsson 229). She also happens to be a genius and a computer whiz. She eventually is hired to assist Blomkvist due to her skill as a researcher. As I mentioned earlier, this is a powerfully intriguing mystery. I was hooked by chapter four, when Blomkvist is hired to conduct his investigation by Harriet’s great-uncle, Henrik Vanger. Henrik tells Blomkvist: “I want you to find out who in the family murdered Harriet, and who since then has spent almost forty years trying to drive me insane” (92). That was the point when I abandoned any remaining reservations and began greedily turning pages. Larsson certainly has a capacity for crafting a potent mystery, partly due to his ability to put the reader in a “sandbox” so to speak. He creates an isolated and finite realm for the imagination to roam in search of the answers. For example, the Vanger estate is located on an island in a rural region of Sweden. On the day Harriet disappeared the one bridge to the mainland was closed due to an accident and all boats had been accounted for, and yet her body was never discovered. Therefore, her disappearance must have occurred on the family-owned island. Blomkvist, too, is isolated in one of these metaphorical “sandboxes” as he works out of a small cabin on Vanger’s island where his neighbors consist almost entirely of a cast of shady members from the nefarious Vanger clan. Here, nestled right in the middle of the viper’s den, Blomkvist, with the help of Salander, realizes that perhaps Harriet’s disappearance is only one in a series of strange disappearances, and that something terrible persists within the Vanger family. Beyond the central mystery, there are a couple of economic and social critiques that crop- up in the novel. Salander serves as a useful tool for the first of these critiques, which focuses on bringing to light abuse against women. The original Swedish title of the book

was actually Men Who Hate Women, and each of the main sections of the book presents a brief national statistic such as “Forty-six percent of women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man”(127). These kinds of details reveal that Larsson intended his book to raise some awareness toward these concerns. I will make no attempt to confirm the validity of Larsson’s statistics, but true or not they certainly are alarming to read in what appears to be a book about an investigation. As for Salander, I won’t reveal anything specific, but I will reiterate that “she always [gets] revenge” (229). The economic critique centers around Blomkvist’s libel conviction at the hands of a major Swedish industrialist and financial broker. Blomkvist’s journalistic focus, outside of his investigation into the missing Harriet, is exposing corrupt business practices and those who Blomkvist refers to as “financial gnomes that some tough reporter should identify and expose as traitors” (575). Certain passages describe situations remarkably similar to the subprime loan financial crisis of the past few years. In clear language, Larsson explains how he distinguishes between the economy and the stock market, writing “The…economy is just as strong or weak or weak today as it was a week ago,” while the stock exchange consists of “only fantasies…it doesn’t have a thing to do with reality or the Swedish economy” (574- 575). Mikael Blomkvist is the solution Larsson proposes to such economic problems – a tough and dedicated journalist who can reveal these distinctions and expose those who would criminally exploit the economy to support their fantasies in the stock exchange. I had no problems with Larsson’s politics until the final few chapters of the book, when the central mystery is solved. Rather than go further into Salander’s mysterious past – which at this point I was mildly interested in – the novel exhausts itself with several chapters of Blomkvist battling the corporation that had originally charged him with libel. The pages are filled with banking mumbo jumbo and dull email correspondence between the involved parties. No mystery is left, Blomkvist and the publication he works for are the good guys, and the big corporations they’re fighting against are the forces of evil. Here, in the last ten percent of the book, Larsson shoves it all right down your throat, no subtlety or ambiguity to be found. Unsatisfactory ending aside, there is much to be enjoyed by picking out a nice comfortable spot on the bandwagon and reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Fans of escapist mystery novels are sure to enjoy it for the power of its primary plot, as well as for the depth of intrigue behind the social and political commentary.