The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (16 page)

Blomkvist notes that Inspector Morell had observed that Harriet’s address book contained five names (some of which are initials) and telephone numbers, belonging to a variety of different people, but there is no obvious link between the names.

We are now nearly halfway through the narrative, and readers who had no preliminary idea that Lisbeth Salander was to become a central figure might have been lulled into a sense of her relative lack of importance. Her laptop has been damaged, and she is persuaded that she needs a new machine – one that costs 38,000 kronor. She realises that she needs the approval of a man she actively dislikes – her new guardian Bjurman – to obtain money for this unprecedented expense. She is told to be at his office that evening. It will be a fateful meeting, we are to learn.

But before this encounter we are taken back to the narrative involving Blomkvist, who has called on the intriguing Cecilia Vanger. She proves once again her intense perception by listing virtually everything that has happened to him and why she thinks he is on the island. He finds that he has taken a liking to her, particularly to her humorous response to him telling her that he has the odd sexual encounter with Erika, the editor-in-chief of
Millennium
. Here we see the syndrome which will be firmly established in the course of the novel, which is Blomkvist’s consistent (and prodigious) good luck with women. Soon, Cecilia is sitting astride him, kissing him on the mouth as he opens her flannel shirt. And we learn that the sexual encounters in the novels will become more explicit and more frequent.

It is as if the sexual floodgates have opened. Larsson cuts straight from Blomkvist’s consensual tryst with Cecilia to a very different sexual encounter: Bjurman is groping Lisbeth as she shows him the statement of her bank account. As so often with the sexual abuse of women in the
Millennium Trilogy
, Larsson could rival such furious feminist writers as Marilyn French in terms of conveying a marked disgust with male sexuality. He is even-handed, but for many readers (both male and female) his position on these issues remains a striking (and multi-faceted) one in the way that it is rendered in his novels.

Salander allows the sexual assault (which mainly consists of Bjurman pressing himself against her) to come to a sordid conclusion, but the alert reader will realise that there is a price to be paid. When she reminds her assailant that she requires money for her computer, he hands her a cheque thinking ‘This is better than a whore. She gets paid with her own money.’ And we encounter for the first time (but not for the last) a truly unpleasant view of a certain kind of male predatoriness. It’s uncomfortable reading, whatever the sex of the reader.

The following chapter (Chapter 12) details Salander’s dispassionate examination of the sexual assault that has just happened to her – and the concomitant lack of control she has undergone (albeit knowingly) but she finds that she is now obliged to take seriously, for the first time, her legal status in regard to her guardian – something she did not do when the more benign Palmgren fulfilled that role. Larsson then takes us back to the origins of Lisbeth’s violence towards men (as usual, it is a response to attacks on her): having been attacked by a boy at school she lay in wait for her attacker with a rounders bat and hit him over the ear with it. She pays the price but it is an indicator of the fact that she is not to be messed with, something the reader will learn – in no uncertain terms – as the book progresses.

Blomkvist, meanwhile, is learning about Cecilia’s jaundiced view of her own family, and we are also reminded of the possible wish-fulfilment element in the novel when Cecilia says to him, ‘To be honest, I have been wondering how you would be in bed ever since I first saw you.’

In the next section it becomes clear (to any reader who still thought that Blomkvist was the sole important protagonist in the novel) that Lisbeth is quite as important – if not more so. As she muses on the sexual abuse she has received, we are told that her sexual encounters are usually at her own initiative, and that she has had over 50 partners since her teenage years. For her, sex is an enjoyable pastime – as long as it is on her own terms. And if sex is used as a weapon against her, we learn, she is prepared to take matters into her own hands to solve her problems. The auguries are not good for Herr Advokat Nils Bjurman.

We now begin a relentless parallel investigation, in which Salander acts as her own client with Bjurman as her target. She investigates with tremendous thoroughness (as one might expect) but Bjurman is a difficult nut to crack, inasmuch as his reputation appears to be without blemish. He has regularly acted as a supervisor for youths, but there appears to be no evidence that he has exploited those in his care. Salander knows, as she puts it, that he was a ‘creep’ and a ‘pig’, but she can find nothing to prove it.

Meanwhile, Blomkvist’s affair with the headmistress Cecilia Vanger is being conducted with great discretion. At the same time, he is professional enough to keep asking her about the family. But the secondary plot of the novel is moving in alarming ways. Salander has decided that Bjurman must die, but in such a way that she cannot be linked to the crime – particularly with her own low standing, as detailed in a variety of reports. She considers using a bomb, and locked in her murderous thoughts, turns down her employer when he has another job for her. She then considers poisons such as prussic acid and even extracting from a carton of cigarettes enough nicotine to act as a lethal substance.

At this point Blomkvist, who is making only tentative progress on the island (possibly because of the sexual distractions at hand), is pursuing a variety of leads but without much success. It’s clear that Larsson knows reader attention will have shifted to the more visceral plot involving Salander. She arrives at her assailant’s flat, and his cynical assumption is that she requires more money. In a scene that is difficult to read, she makes her way to the bed but provokes him into hitting her. Things are not going well, she realises, as her T-shirt is being torn, and that he is reaching for handcuffs in a drawer near the bed. What follows is an excruciating description of forced anal sex. Even readers who baulked at the fact that Bjurman had to die (however unpleasant the first sexual encounter between the two was) will be persuaded that whatever Salander does – and it is clear that she will do something – will be justified.

To some degree, Larsson is in tune with the feminist writers of an earlier era whose attitude to male sexuality often evoked violence and violation as part of the experience. What is different here, of course, is the fact that the author counterpoints the negative sexual experiences that Salander is forced to suffer with the pleasant, consensual ones between Blomkvist and his new love – in fact, Larsson cuts from Salander’s anal rape to the affectionate post-coital conversation between Blomkvist and Cecilia, as if to remind the reader that sex need not be as unpleasant as it has been for Salander.

At the beginning of Chapter 14, Larsson ensures that if we have not acquired sufficient revulsion from the sexual assault in the preceding chapter, we will certainly be provided with it now. Salander spends the week in bed, bleeding from the rectum and with stomach pains and other wounds. As the author puts it, she is now the victim of systematic brutality. She has also been made aware that she may well have died during the night she has just suffered, but the fact that she does not shed a tear gives some indication of the concentration of feeling – and resolve – which is to power her actions. What she does, in fact, is to have another tattoo added to those she already possesses, this time a band on her ankle. It is, she tells the tattooist, a reminder.

One of the things that Larsson is particularly adroit at is the springing of the unexpected on the reader. The speed with which Salander turns up at Bjurman’s apartment, and the brevity with which the first stage of her revenge is enacted, both take the reader by surprise. She is leading Bjurman towards the bed – he is under the impression that she is sufficiently cowed – when she suddenly pushes a Taser into his armpit and discharges 75,000 volts. As he loses the use of his legs, she pushes him onto the bed. At that point, Larsson does something which we are to learn is one of his most canny tricks. The reader may want to continue reading in horrified fascination the violent events we have just been party to, but Larsson (audaciously) decides instead to develop the character of Cecilia Vanger a little more, as she drinks a bottle of wine alone and muses on her new lover, and her relationship with her father. We learn that her own marriage had ended with domestic violence: consistent abuse, violent blows to the head and being knocked to the floor. Even concerning what may be seen as a secondary character, the central motif of the novel is implacably played out.

But then Larsson takes us back to Bjurman, lying naked on the bed, handcuffed. Salander has placed an anal plug between his buttocks, and she tells him that she has found his ‘toys’: a riding whip and other paraphernalia are spread out on the floor. But the most surprising object in the room is the massive TV and DVD player. Using recordings she has made of the sexual assaults on her, Salander tells him that he will be looking at a DVD showing him raping a ‘handicapped’ 24-year-old girl (herself, of course) for whom he was appointed guardian. She will now, she tells him, be the only one to have access to her bank account. His reports on her welfare should be written as positive and upbeat. And if he ever tries to contact her again, the copies of the DVD will be sent to every newsroom in Stockholm.

She reads a list of other requirements, but the spread-eagled Bjurman is already thinking that some time – some way – he will manage to obtain the incriminating DVD. But then she climbs upon him, grasping a needle. Salander tattoos him with words that cover his stomach from his chest to his genitals: ‘I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT AND A RAPIST.’ It’s a measure of the lengths to which Salander will go to avenge herself.

Salander turns up once again at Armansky’s office and he remarks on the fact that she has been incommunicado for so long. But the two hear a report on the radio about the fact that the magazine
Millennium
will have a part-owner, Henrik Vanger, and that Blomkvist will once again be publisher after he has finished his prison sentence. ‘Well, isn’t that something,’ says Salander, and the reader realises that after what appears to be a diversion, we are back onto the main plot. In fact, of course, the main plot principally involves the abuse of Salander and at this point, almost halfway through the novel, we may be said to have had its parameters laid out before us. Or have we? At home, Salander marshals her facts: the lawyer from Hedestad has hired her to investigate Blomkvist, a man given a jail sentence for a libel against the all-powerful Hans-Erik Wennerström. Subsequently, Vanger joins Blomkvist’s magazine as a financial partner and talks about a conspiracy to destroy
Millennium
. And – with what we will soon learn is her customary prescience – she has discovered that Wennerström worked in the Vanger corporation in the 1960s. There are multiple skeletons in a host of cupboards which Salander then decides to investigate.

Part Three of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
is called ‘Mergers’, and once again has a superscription relating to a particular concern of the author’s: ‘13% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to aggravated sexual assault outside of a sexual relationship’. By now, of course, readers will have realised that this is a crucial leitmotif of the novel, and it will feature once again in a significant fashion. This section of the book begins with Blomkvist being released from prison on Friday 16 May, some two months after his incarceration. As had been predicted, a recommendation was made for a reduction of his sentence, and his period in prison had been pleasant enough (a lesser novelist might have made this section harrowing simply to increase the pressure points on the reader, but it is refreshing that Larsson treats this in a realistic fashion). His protagonist returns to the cabin in Hedeby, joined by the cat that adopted him previously. Meeting Vanger again, he asks him how it feels to be involved with the magazine, and his elderly employer tells him that he is actually having fun doing it.

When Blomkvist leaves Vanger, it is dark but he senses that spring is near. We are reminded again of the author’s skills at evoking atmosphere, season and locale. Unsurprisingly, Blomkvist makes his way to the door of his new lover Cecilia Vanger’s home. But instead of the warm welcome he expects, she seems not particularly pleased to see him and asks him to leave without offering an explanation. He had, before his incarceration, returned the Vanger documentation on Harriet, as he did not wish to leave it in a deserted house. But looking at the remaining reports, he finds that he is reading them again and looking at photographs which had been taken on the day the young girl disappeared. Something strikes him. He is looking at a young Henrik Vanger and a young Harald (he has still not met the latter, reclusive figure) but in the crowd of onlookers he notices a young woman in a light-coloured dress. It is Cecilia.

Some time later, Cecilia herself arrives at his door and says that she has decided to tell him the reason for his unwelcoming reception earlier. She informs him that she has had only had five sexual partners in her life and that the period when he began his imprisonment was a desperately unhappy one for her. She found herself an old maid in her fifties again.

In all the best crime and thriller novels, of course, the personal element has a way of intervening and derailing the probing of the detective/investigative figures. It happens to Blomkvist when Erika Berger turns up and finds Blomkvist in bed with Cecilia Vanger. Needless to say, she doesn’t take it well, and despite his attempts to defend his position, he finds himself on the back foot. There is an uncomfortable dinner, at which are present Vanger, Erika, Blomkvist and Cecilia; the conversation stays on the relatively safe territory of
Millennium’
s development and the new subscribers it has managed to attain. Blomkvist decides to tell Cecilia that he has spotted something in a photograph album, but does not elucidate.