The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (19 page)

Salander is not surprised by the death and she has already grown tired of the investigation into his affairs. Blomkvist and Salander meet and have Christmas dinner before returning home to light a fire in the wood stove, listen to an Elvis Presley CD and (as Larsson puts it) devote themselves to ‘some plain old sex’. But already we are aware of something that has been clear from their very first sexual encounter: despite their feelings for each other, Salander would never be happy with someone who has penetrated her defences, and the relationship really has no future beyond that of an intense friendship and dependence. Blomkvist has a meeting with his employer, Vanger, and the latter tells Blomkvist that he hasn’t finished the job he was hired for – he hasn’t written the Vanger family chronicle, which was the assignment, but the journalist declares that he does not intend to write it. There is an accommodation between the two men.

The novel ends in a low-key fashion as Salander closes herself off from the rest of the world and even, amazingly, leaves her computer switched off. Despite her mixed feelings towards Blomkvist, she hankers for him to ring the doorbell but – to what end? It is no longer sex that she wants from him, but simply his company. Refreshingly, Larsson does not offer a personality makeover for his heroine. He reminds us that she has no faith in herself while Blomkvist inhabits a world in which people hold down respectable jobs and orderly lives. She decides to knock on his door but en route she glances towards a café and sees Blomkvist emerging with Erika Berger. The couple laugh and show signs of affection. They also make it abundantly clear that they are sexual partners. Salander is torn apart by the pain of what she sees, and is frozen with dismay. She fantasises about violence against Berger but in the end realises that there is nothing she can do. She calls herself a pathetic fool and turns to return to her home. As she passes a rubbish skip she throws away the 1950s metal Elvis Presley advertising sign she had bought to give Blomkvist as a Christmas present. It was advertising ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.

The ending is the perfect choice for a novel which has taken the reader on the proverbial rollercoaster ride, not just through shocking revelations and deception on a massive scale but a lacerating personal journey into the psyches of its troubled protagonists. Had there not been successive novels, there would still be a sense of closure at the end of this first book. But, having said that, the reader who will be aware that there are two more books to come, and is likely to remain hungry to spend more time in the company of the tenacious Mikael Blomkvist and the self-destructive, but more than capable, Lisbeth Salander.

CHAPTER 8

THE BOOKS:

The Girl Who Played With Fire

I
t’s interesting to speculate what new heights of publishing success Stieg Larsson might have achieved had he lived, having already created an entirely new kind of heroine for crime fiction. His freelance investigator, ace computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, couldn’t be further from the booze-loving coppers (male and female) who populate most of the genre. She is a surly young woman, relying on her Goth appearance, with tattoos and skin piercings, to keep people at bay (except those she decides to sleep with – on her own terms). But underneath the forbidding exterior she has, as already described, a cutting intelligence.

In the second book,
The Girl Who Played with Fire
, Larsson continues to pair her with the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist. But as the book opens we learn that Lisbeth has cut herself off from everyone who knows her; she has (despite her contempt for the opinions of others) had breast enlargement surgery, and has taken up with a naive younger lover. After exacting revenge on a corrupt authority figure who has abused her, she is soon the key suspect in three savage murders, and the ex-security analyst is on the run, the object of a nationwide search. But her ally, Blomkvist, who has just published an exposé of the sex trafficking industry in Sweden, is on her side – even though she dumped him as a lover. As with the first book in the
Millennium Trilogy
, this is exuberant stuff: the 600-or-so page novel may be (like its predecessor) in need of pruning, but its rebellious, taboo-breaking heroine is an absolute winner.

Larsson begins in familiar territory. In the disturbing flashback prologue, Lisbeth Salander is half-naked and tied to a bed with leather straps in a darkened room. She has been imprisoned for 43 days. To keep her sanity she fantasises about setting fire to her abductor. He appears: he is tall, has reddish-brown tangled hair, sparse goatee, glasses with black frames, aftershave, speaks with a dark, clear voice, emphasising every word. He wishes her ‘Happy Birthday’. By this point Larsson has reader tension ratcheted up to a high degree. The man attempts to rape her, but she retaliates. He tightens the straps, we think he will try again, but he leaves. She again fantasises about dowsing him with petrol. The author, as aware as ever of the value of withholding key information, hits us with the killer punch line – she is only 13.

As Chapter 1 opens, Larsson has moved the action forward again and we find Lisbeth Salander at a hotel on the Caribbean island of Grenada, watching coolly as a woman emerges from the pool. She is slim with shoulder-length brown hair, an oval face, wearing a black bikini and sunglasses; we learn she is 35 and talks with a Southern US accent. Salander is tanned brown, despite trying to keep in the shade, smokes, and is wearing khaki shorts and a black top. Steel drums, we are told, fascinate her.

Salander is keeping an eye on the woman because she suspects her husband is abusing her – she hears noises of ‘muted terror’ from them in the room next to hers. Once again we have Larsson’s protagonist acting as vigilante/avenger, and once again the male sex is painted in unsavoury fashion. The husband is presumably in Grenada on business. The couple argue strenuously every night while Salander tries to concentrate on a book about the mysteries of maths – typical reading, we now know, for her. She almost kicks in their door to put a stop to it. Next day she notices the woman has a bruise on her shoulder and a scrape on her hip.

We also learn that Salander has become fascinated with a, for her, typically esoteric subject – spherical astronomy. She has visited Rome, Miami, Florida Keys – and is now island-hopping through the Caribbean. She came ashore at St George’s, the capital of Grenada, in an off-season tropical rainstorm and is staying at the Keys Hotel. She finds the local fruit, guinep, delightful – like sour Swedish gooseberries. Larsson is adept at this kind of physical preference detail applied to his heroine – and it appears just as we had started to think she isn’t quite human: such info ‘grounds’ her for the reader.

Using the device of judicious switch of protagonists that was one of the pleasures of the first book, Larsson now transports us back to Lundagatan, where Mikael Blomkvist calls at Salander’s apartment – as he has done every week or so – and wonders where she is. He remembers the affair they conducted (for half a year) during the events of the previous entry in the
Millennium Trilogy
. Salander, of course, had saved his life – and he recollects her photographic memory and phenomenal computer skills – and the fact that she is a world-class hacker, known online as ‘Wasp’. They parted two days before Christmas, with Lisbeth wanting nothing more to do with him. This, of course, is a canny strategy on Larsson’s part, as it re-establishes the initial dynamic between the couple, compromised by their abortive sexual relationship.

Salander has a shower. She weighs 40kg, stands 1m 52cm, and has doll-like, delicate limbs, small hands and hardly any hips. But, we are surprised to read, she is pleased with her new, full breasts, following surgery in a clinic outside Genoa when she was 25. This is one of Larsson’s more controversial choices for his heroine – surely her utter self-reliance (however damaged her psyche) would have precluded such a remoulding of her body along conventional, male-pleasing lines? But it has made her happier and given her more self-confidence – we may decide for ourselves if we agree with her choices. She now enjoys wearing sexy lingerie because of her fuller figure, another surprising detail, given her usual taste for off-putting physical accoutrements.

Salander takes a bus to St George’s, a compact and tight-knit town on a U-shaped bay, with houses climbing up steep hills. She withdraws $300, sits on the veranda of the Turtleback restaurant and watches as the man from her next-door room comes out, sits down, and stares out at the sea.

Some readers may wonder why the author talks in depth about Salander’s interest in mathematics, especially riddles and puzzles. There’s a great deal here about the book she’s reading, the 1,200-page
Dimensions in Mathematics
. We discover all about Fermat’s Last Theorem, the puzzle set by a French civil servant in 1601 and only solved in 1993. It apparently takes Salander seven weeks to find her own solution. This accruing of information is a crucial element in the heroine’s make-up, and conveying it at length to the reader persuades us that it is not mere literary window-dressing.

The hotel barmaid, Ella Carmichael, tells Salander the couple in the room next door are Dr Forbes and his wife. He is discussing plans for a new high school in St George’s – ‘
A good man,
’ says Ella. ‘
Who beats his wife,
’ snaps back Lisbeth. Back in her room she e-mails ‘plague.xyz_666’ to request information on Forbes and his wife, offering a $500 reward.

If readers feel that Larsson is insufficiently critical of his acerbic heroine, there is a clue to the ambiguity of his attitude in the description of a new sexual relationship Lisbeth has initiated. She visits her lover, George Bland, a student of 16 who she befriended the day after she arrived on the island, helping him with his maths homework. She finds his company relaxing. She does not normally make small talk with strangers, and she doesn’t like personal discussions. But she seduces the boy on an impulse, and now they see each other every evening. Lisbeth is unquestionably the controlling, dominant force in the relationship with the immature George – and it might be argued that she ruthlessly uses a variety of means (including her newly augmented body) in a fashion that is not ideologically dissimilar to the men who have dominated her – though there is no suggestion of the grim bullying she has received.

For Chapter 2, Larsson switches our attention to a café on Stureplan, and a nemesis of Salander’s. Nils Erik Bjurman is thinking about what Salander did to him. It’s another example of Larsson’s attitude to his own sex that those who undergo sexual humiliation of the kind they practise on women are splenetic forces of malevolence, bent on revenge at all costs. Bjurman, we remember, was a lawyer assigned to be Salander’s legal guardian. Salander was considered a promiscuous child and in need of protection. But Bjurman abused his position and raped her – and consequently Salander took her revenge on him by tattooing his crimes on his belly. A broken man, he gave up most of his clients and wrote fictitious, positive monthly reports on Salander – as she had stipulated. He sets about getting skin grafts to remove the tattoo. Salander had visited him in the middle of the night and blackmailed him with a DVD she had made of the rape: she is going away, but Bjurman must continue writing his reports as if she is still under his protection, or she will make public the DVD. From that moment on Bjurman has an overwhelming desire to destroy her – this galvanises him and gives his life a new purpose.

While Bjurman is bitterly remembering what Salander did, Mikael Blomkvist (unaware of the lawyer’s existence) passes him to join his editor-in-chief, and erstwhile lover, Erika Berger, at a nearby table. Blomkvist lights up a cigarette. Erika detests smokers – not a reliable indicator of her character, as the chain-smoking author might be expected to disagree with her – and makes a veiled reference to finding a lover who doesn’t smoke. She’s meeting childhood friend Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Rosenberg. We learn that Blomkvist is being sexually harassed by a work-experience girl, the daughter of one of Erika’s friends, who is only 17 (both Berger and Blomkvist are 45). This is something of a reversal of the serial sexual harassment practised by males in the books – but Blomkvist’s experience is more a nuisance than anything else.

His long-term affair with Berger began 20 years ago when she was a young journo. He radiates self-confidence and is entirely non-threatening, hence (as Larsson tells us) his attraction to the opposite sex (readers may argue with this as a rationale for the journalist’s extraordinary success with women). He prefers older women – Salander was an aberration. He doesn’t want a repeat of this entanglement with the media school graduate who is working at
Millennium
. She is clearly desperate for him (more Larsson wish-fulfilment by proxy?), and he doesn’t want to hurt her.

We switch from these minor problems to a major one exercising one of the trilogy’s many villains. The despicable Bjurman is contemplating how to get the incriminating DVD back from Salander (he is unaware of her link with Blomkvist). As her guardian, he has access to all her medical records. Over time, he has tracked down all the information he can find about her. The more he reads about her, the more he sees her as a sick, twisted psycho – but still, tellingly, as he sees it, a whore.

According to notes made by her former therapist, Palmgren, something had set off Salander’s madness when she was 12 or 13 (cryptically referred to as ‘All the Evil’). Since then, her mother had been incapable of looking after her and she had lived in foster homes. But what was ‘The Evil’? Readers will remember the events of the prologue and make a connection. Salander has a twin sister, Camilla, and nothing is known of her father. A missing report dated 12 March 1991 could provide the answer to her trauma, but Bjurman is denied access to it. Two months later he has the 47-page report and discovers the identity of someone else (the abductor) who must hate her as much as he does. It is a grim, if improbable, alliance. He is interrupted in his reverie by the appearance of a towering blond bodybuilder who tells him ‘We got your letter’…