The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (25 page)

Salander tells Zala that
Millennium
, Dragan Armansky and Bublanski are all after him, but he is adamant that there is not a shred of incriminating evidence in his home. Niedermann comes back, attaches a silencer to his gun and they all troop out into the woods (needless to say, few readers will at this point be turning the pages in leisurely fashion). There Lisbeth is roughly pushed into a freshly dug pit, but before she is shot by the giant, she holds up her palmtop, claiming everything they’ve said has been broadcast on internet radio. Zala sees she’s lying, and as Niedermann examines her hand she strikes out at the giant with a spade, breaking his nose (again). They fight. But Zala has a gun too and fires three times at Salander… killing her? It appears so. A bullet lodges in her brain, causing massive trauma and… it seems… death.

Zala is shaking, amazed that she almost got away. They dump her body in the hole and bury her. Zala is relieved that she is dead at last. They go back to his house and he gently tends Niedermann’s wounds. Like one of the writers he admires, Ian Fleming, Stieg Larsson has apparently killed off his protagonist at the end of a book (although readers’ knowledge that this is Part Two of a trilogy may be an indicator of the surprises to come).

After a long train delay, Blomkvist arrives in Göteborg, takes a cab to a car he’s hired and drives out of the city at 10.30 pm.

Salander awakes to find herself buried alive. She starts digging her way upwards through the soil. (An incidental
locus classicus
here might be Tarantino’s
Kill Bill Vol. 2.
) Eventually she has surfaced and, in great pain, wanders off through the woods to Zala’s farmhouse. She thinks about looking for a petrol can and a match and goes into the woodshed. Zala hears her and goes out to investigate. Salander swings an axe at his face, cleaving into it, then wedges it in his knee. She doesn’t have the power to kill him cleanly. He is incapacitated, and she takes out the gun he shot her with – it’s only a Browning .22 (‘a bloody boy-scout pistol’) which accounts for her still being alive.

Having already ratcheted up the mayhem to a near-delirious level, Larsson shows he still has aces up his sleeve. Niedermann wakes up from a nap when he hears Zala’s screams. He enters the woodshed and sees Salander, but knowing she is dead he thinks it’s a demon. He fantasises that she has a lizard-like skin, a whipping tail, glowing eyes, spiked teeth and spouts flames from her mouth. She shoots at him but narrowly misses. He runs away in abject fear.

She doesn’t shoot Zala, choosing to keep her last bullet for Niedermann, and goes back to the farmhouse where she is shocked by her corpse-like appearance – no wonder the giant was terrified. She arms herself with his gun, a P-83 Wanad. She realises how badly she is injured. In another improbable suspension of disbelief, Larsson has us accept that she can feel her brain through the hole in the back of her head.

Niedermann is ashamed of running off, but doesn’t think there’s any point returning to help Zala – it’s a lost cause now. All he needs is a car to take him away to Göteborg, and then he sees one racing towards him. Blomkvist’s, presumably.

Salander puts the gun to her head… she is so badly injured that she just wants to end it all.

Blomkvist stops as Niedermann waves him down. Realising who he is, the journalist points his Colt 1911 Government gun at him, gets him to lie down and ties him securely to a road sign, and sets off for the farm. He finds the wounded, moaning Zala in the woodshed. Then he goes to the farmhouse and finds Salander. She has the gun in her hand, but clearly hasn’t had the energy to fire it. Her eyes are unfocused. She whispers, ‘Kalle Bastard Blomkvist.’

He dials the emergency services.

The ending of the remarkable second book in the trilogy has a markedly different feel to that of its predecessor. Whereas
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
functioned as a self-contained entity, Book Two feels very much like the consciously conceived second part of a sequence, with a masterly orchestration of effects leading inexorably to the final book of the
Millennium Trilogy
. And as the trilogy has clearly been conceived as an entity, there is no sense of the famous (and dreaded) ‘second book syndrome’ – whereby the debut book of a new novelist is followed by a marking-time, lower-key entry. In fact, Larsson didn’t have time for such niceties; everything had to be as near-fully-realised in its achievement as he could make it. Did he have a sense of his own pending mortality?

CHAPTER 9

THE BOOKS:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

A
tattooed young woman lies in intensive care, a bullet in her brain. A few rooms away is the man who has tried to kill her – her father. His body bears multiple axe injuries (inflicted by the young woman). If she recovers, she will face trial for three murders – but not if the man down the hall is able to kill her first.

There’s no arguing that
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
hits the ground running, and the pace rarely lets up for an arm-straining 600 pages. It’s an exhilarating, if exhausting, read. But the book is also something very special, and unique, in the world of crime thrillers.

Once again, Stieg Larsson grabs our attention with his two protagonists: Lisbeth Salander and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who fights to clear her name – even though she dumped him as her lover. Salander’s numerous enemies here include some very nasty types, from her hideous father to equally murderous secret organisations and self-serving politicians. And these various nemeses all want her discredited – or dead. Larsson is unsparing in the area of grisly violence (one more characteristic – along with a vulnerable heroine – he shares with another bestselling author, Thomas Harris). But this is a strong and satisfying conclusion to a massively ambitious, richly detailed trilogy, and readers will regret that this is our last opportunity to share the invigorating company of Lisbeth Salander – until we watch the various films of the books.

The minute and detailed analysis of plot incident with which the first two books have been addressed seems not quite as appropriate here; not because there is less plot (in many ways the narrative is as densely packed as before), but because there is a trajectory in which individual incident is perhaps not as important than the rounding off of certain themes and notions about the central characters. Part One is entitled ‘Intermezzo in a Corridor’, and this musical allusion is certainly on the ironic side. The musical form employed throughout this book is largely
accelerando
with none of the languor of an intermezzo.

The chapter begins with a superscription concerning the hundreds of women who served during the American civil war disguised as men, and Larsson makes points about historians having difficulty dealing with gender distinctions. (His remark about women taking part in Swedish moose hunts has a certain unintended irony from a left-wing writer such as Larsson, when most readers’ image of a moose-hunting woman will be the extremely right-wing presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.) He goes on to discuss Amazons and warrior women, mentioning Boudicca, honoured with a statue in London on the Thames near Big Ben, and suggests that the reader ‘say hello to her if they pass by’. One might argue that his own warrior woman, Salander, is somebody one would be ill-advised to say a casual hello to. Particularly if you are a male who has been engaged in any inappropriate sexual activity.

The doctor, Jonasson, who is reporting on Salander, is tired after a variety of life-saving operations, and is described as a goal-keeper standing between the patient and the funeral service, with his decisions ineluctably life-and-death ones – ironically, of course, life-and-death decisions are those repeatedly taken by the two protagonists throughout the length of the story. Jonasson is told that the girl lying injured in the hospital room is Lisbeth Salander – the girl who has been hunted for weeks for a triple murder in Stockholm. This does not particularly interest him, as he perceives his job to be that of saving a patient’s life. We are given a vivid picture of the barely controlled chaos of an A&E department, and a brief character sketch of the doctor, which some readers might see as irrelevant, but will now recognise this as a part of Larsson’s strategy to flesh out the bones of his narrative. We are given a report on the woman in her mid-20s who is lying, barely alive, with a weak pulse and various bullets in her body. The fact that she is still alive after having a bullet lodged so near her brain is considered something of a miracle.

After this arresting opening, Larsson cuts to Blomkvist, looking at a clock and discovering that it is after three o’clock in the morning. He is handcuffed, exhausted and sitting at a kitchen table in a farmhouse near Nossebro. Blomkvist is remonstrating with a man who is keeping him prisoner, calling him an imbecile: ‘I warned you he was dangerous, for Christ’s sake… I told you that you would have to handle him like a live grenade.’ Blomkvist is in a state of some depression, having found Salander after midnight, wounded in what might be a mortal fashion. He had sent for the rescue service and the police. The medics had also taken care of Alexander Zalachenko. We are reminded that this man was both Salander’s father and her worst enemy – he had tried to kill her and had earned an axe wound in his face and considerable damage to one of his legs for the attempt.

Calling Erika Berger on his mobile, Blomkvist fills her in on the situation, pointing out that Salander is the one who is in considerable danger. The policeman with whom Blomkvist is so infuriated is Paulsson, who is presented by Larsson as the most thick-headed kind of copper. Blomkvist tries to explain that the man who had actually committed the murders in Stockholm was not Lisbeth but Ronald Niedermann, an incredibly powerful man who had been left sitting tied to a traffic sign in a ditch. The attempt to arrest him by Paulsson’s men has, of course, resulted in bloody violence and the escape of a highly dangerous man. Blomkvist insists that a call is made to Inspector Bublanski – a policeman that the journalist knows he can trust.

We then cut to another sympathetic copper, Inspector Modig. She has awoken at four o’clock to learn from Bublanski that everything ‘has gone to hell down in Trollhättan’. She is told that Blomkvist found Salander, Niedermann and Zalachenko, and her colleague gives her a rough idea of the state of things. These two intelligent police officers realise that the situation has degenerated into something like chaos. A further police discussion ties up plot elements with which the reader is now familiar – such as the fact that the ruthless Zalachenko is Lisbeth’s father and was a hitman for Russian military intelligence, who defected in the 1970s and has been running his own criminal network since that date. All of this is conveyed by Blomkvist, who now looks utterly exhausted. Inspector Erlander, listening to the summing up (including the fact that Salander is innocent of the murders she is accused of) finds himself willing to listen, particularly as he does not give much credence to the deductions of the inefficient Paulsson. However, the story is so outrageous that he finds his credulity being stretched.

Larsson takes us back to the hospital room where Doctor Jonasson is pulling off his bloodstained gloves after the operation. We don’t yet know the result. Blomkvist, meanwhile, has persuaded Erlander that Salander was shot and buried at the farmhouse, but has somehow managed to survive and dig herself free. The police continue to search for the escaped monster who had cut a swathe through their ranks – a missing patrol car is discovered, and it is supposed that the escaped criminal has switched vehicles. Blomkvist asks if there is any information concerning Salander’s condition and is told that she has been operated on during the night, with a bullet being removed from her head. He asks about Zalachenko and the police at that point are not aware who he is talking about. However, Blomkvist learns that Lisbeth’s father was also operated on last night for a deep gash across his face and another below the kneecap. His injuries are severe but not life-threatening. Blomkvist is talking to Modig who, broadly speaking, he trusts. He points out that he knows Salander’s secret hideout, but as she has spent considerable time creating the bolt hole for herself he has no intention of revealing it to them. Modig reminds him that this is a murder investigation, to which Blomkvist snaps, ‘You still haven’t got it, have you?’ Lisbeth is in fact innocent and the police have violated her and destroyed her reputation in ways that beggar belief.

This is, of course, part of the strategy that has been necessary throughout the three books and is not a million miles away from the tactics utilised by Hitchcock in such films as
North By Northwest
and
The Thirty-Nine Steps
: make it absolutely imperative that the central protagonist cannot call on the police for help, so that they are always at the extreme reaches of danger from both the heavies and the forces of the establishment. Of course, things are ratcheted up to the nth degree in the
Millennium Trilogy
, but the process remains a sound one in terms of engaging the reader’s sympathy. Blomkvist, of course, is more like most readers in being the person who is able to talk to the police and, to some degree, help to clarify the strands of the tangled narrative.

By now, more and more police are involved, several of whom are convinced that Salander was guilty of murder, and there is perhaps a danger that the author has introduced too many police officers, both sympathetic and otherwise, into the narrative – it is undoubtedly true that even the most well-disposed of readers sometimes have to struggle to remember which particular copper is being talked about at any moment (perhaps another reminder that a few profitable pruning sessions with an editor would have been an asset for Larsson). Later, Blomkvist remembers that his rental car was still at the farm, but he was too exhausted to call for it. Erlander arranges for the car to be picked up. It is at this point that the journalist makes a significant call, to someone he can trust – his sister Advokat Annika Giannini, a woman who will figure importantly in the narrative. When he has explained Salander’s extreme situation, Annika asks if Lisbeth might require her services as a lawyer. Her brother replies that the accused woman isn’t the type to ask anyone for help, but it is clear that from this point on – whether she wants it or not – Salander is to have someone else on her side. It might be noted that Larsson both admires Lisbeth’s self-sufficiency and simultaneously regards it as, finally, inadequate – she needs help, just as she herself offers it to a chosen few. She is, we are reminded, an incomplete personality.