The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (3 page)

How separate were the identities of Larsson the campaigning journalist and Larsson the novelist? In a paper that the writer gave at a conference for OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) in Paris in June 2004, he used a telling phrase about how slander, innuendo or rumour was utilised by hate groups ‘to legitimise the actions’ that follow – i.e. retributional violence. In some ways, a metaphor for his novels might be adduced from this statement – one that Larsson himself might not have liked.

Analysing the structure of all the Larsson novels we can see that the reader is presented with the elements of ‘slander, innuendo or rumour’ (via their use against the beleaguered Lisbeth Salander) – along with extreme violence, sexual or otherwise – to ‘legitimise the actions that follow’, i.e. Lisbeth’s use of massive force to rout and destroy her enemies. The legitimising process is both a function of Salander’s action-generating rationale and ours as complicit readers – we are persuaded of the loathsome tactics of her opponents, and, accordingly) her violent reaction has a moral justification, a sort of brass-knuckle version of the equal and opposite reactions of Newton’s laws of motion.

In a paper called ‘The Nature and Extent of the Relationship Between Racist, Xenophobic and Anti-Semitic Propaganda on the internet and Hate Crimes’, Larsson (credited as part of the ‘Expo Foundation, Sweden’) invokes the British journal
Searchlight
(of which, of course, he was a foreign luminary) specifically, an editorial which posited that racist violence follows racist agitation, ‘as sure as night follows day’.

Larsson said that he would like to make ‘a small point’, continuing: ‘It seems to be a foregone conclusion that violence follows hate propaganda.’ But while agreeing with this argument, Larsson had a slightly more nuanced position.

‘We have seen this all through recorded history,’ he went on. ‘When a nation or a clan or a paramilitary outfit – or whatever – is about to go and do something fundamentally evil to other people, there will be a period of slander, innuendo or rumour-mongering that is meant to legitimise the actions that will follow. The best-known case in world history of hate propaganda leading to violence is perhaps
Mein Kampf
by Adolf Hitler, who outlined [in that book] the core of his political philosophy – that Jews were the ultimate evil and had to be purged. We all know the result of this.’

But Larsson observed that when addressing the research on the subject as he prepared for the paper he was to give, it struck him that although a large number of websites across the world took on the subject of hate propaganda, there was little actual scientific research being quoted on such sites.

‘I couldn’t find a single scientific paper,’ Larsson lamented, ‘mapping out the relationship between agitation and action. At the same time, it would perhaps seem superfluous to point out that propaganda is the tool of any lobby group or political group from right to left, from good to evil. I rather doubt that any group would spend time, effort and money on propaganda if it didn’t have a proven effect.’

Larsson’s attitude to the propaganda that bombards us daily was relatively benign – he noted, for instance, its acceptable legal status. After the end of the Second World War, he observed, race biology and obviously anti-Semitic sentiments didn’t make much of an impact on everyday life among Europeans. ‘Although there were an abundance of groups producing hate propaganda, a Nazi magazine or a leaflet was actually very hard to come by for the average member of the public. You really had to make an effort to be able to read any of the rather tatty Mimeographed editions making the rounds in the political sub-vegetation.

‘The arrival of the internet has changed all that. And to tell the truth, we who monitor such things have been slow to catch on. For the racist groups, cyberspace is a dream. It is no accident that today the first item on the agenda for any racist or ultra-nationalist group is the creation of a home page. Nazis were among the first to realise the potential of the internet. This is clearly worded in their own internal strategies.’

Larsson, always
au fait
with the exigencies of disseminating information, posited that compared with the production of books or magazines, the internet was cost-reductive: it is cheap and easy to maintain.

‘An internet homepage of the smallest racist group of three or four people has the same circulation and availability as
Der Spiegel
or a CNN broadcast. It is in everybody’s computer, just the click of a mouse away. And – perhaps most importantly – it offers a brand new way of organising, merchandising, fundraising and communication.’

In a conclusion with obvious ramifications for his later fiction, Larsson pointed out that on the internet you can find absolutely anything you are looking for – a proposition even truer today than when Larsson made it.

‘Experts in terrorism,’ he continued, ‘will tell you that every group that has ever taken violent action has done so following a period – sometimes years – of active propaganda. In many ways this stage is the process of dehumanizing the target of your propaganda… first you joke about the Holocaust, and then you claim it is a forgery – it never happened.’

Interestingly, though, Larsson was keen to broaden out the discussion from attacks on minority ethnic groups by pointing out that propaganda often has another underlying theme (one with considerable resonance in the US with its survivalist movements): fostering suspicion against democratic society, democratic politicians and democracy itself.

‘My personal opinion’, he said, ‘one which some of my partners and associates will agree with, while others will disagree, is that legislation alone cannot solve the challenge of internet hate propaganda. Indeed, I would even counsel caution against relying too much on legislation. Please don’t misunderstand me. We have laws separating right from wrong according to our social standards. If we have a law against incitement of racial hatred, then let us by all means use it as a tool to prosecute offenders.

‘But the reality of the problem is that we are now facing thousands and thousands of racist pages from all over the world. The reality of the situation is that we haven’t even got enough police officers to investigate, let alone enough prosecutors to take action. For that reason, the judicial process in any country will only skim the surface and make examples of a few of the worst offenders, while letting most of the offensive material slide.’

Larsson had saved his most telling salvoes till the end of his address, noting that the radical Right had become a significant political movement, whereas many years ago it had been a small fringe, netting at best a handful of votes in elections. It was to become an even more telling observation after the author’s death. Recently, a crime-fiction-writing team, comprising a journalist and criminologist and a reformed criminal, has enjoyed massive success in Sweden. The duo goes simply by their two surnames: Roslund and Hellström. I spoke to Anders Roslund, an articulate, award-winning journalist, about Larsson’s comment a few days after the Swedish far Right’s electoral success in 2010, asking when Sweden became the broken society that Stieg Larsson depicts. ‘Last week at the elections,’ he replied dryly. Roslund and Hellström are among the heirs apparent to Larsson. Their novel
Three Seconds
(translated into English by Kari Dickson) is a book that invites comparison with
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
: there is the same obsessive piling on of detail, the same endemic corruption of the authorities (police force, Ministry of Justice), and there’s even Larsson’s tactic of the slow, challenging introductory chapters that suddenly shift into higher gear.

Larsson’s comments also included this observation: ‘Today the same groups have moved out of the basement hideouts they could be found in during the 1960s and 1970s. In some countries they are polling 10% to 15% of the vote. In other words, we have a shift of the political winds in which sentiments which were almost taboo 30 years ago are again becoming a real political option. The internet has become one of the most important tools in the revival of race-hate politics. This is the challenge offered to democracy by racism.’

His conclusion was a rational but perhaps over-hopeful one, given the straitened budgets of most governments, along with the rise of confrontational religious extremism, since his death: ‘We cannot wish that they will go away. We cannot legislate the problem away. We can only defeat them in a process where democratic society will rise to this challenge. And to do that we need more research, more knowledge, more funding, more democratic groups responding to these movements.’

CHAPTER 2

THE RELATIVES

S
tieg Larsson’s father and brother, Erland and Joakim, are very different: on the occasions when I spoke to them, I found two very distinct personalities. While Erland gives the impression of being slightly less worldly than either of his sons, he has clearly learnt how to deal with the astonishing media sensation that Stieg’s life became after his death. But, controversially, Erland is, perhaps to his credit, not the kind of personality to play the sort of role that might be expected of him, that’s to say, a sober-voiced, judicious custodian of the flame. What is crystal clear is his immense pride, uncomplicatedly expressed, in his late son’s achievement, not to mention a continuing surprise at just how jaw-droppingly global the success has become. Erland has learned to enjoy that acclaim, but he remains intrigued to hear people discuss Stieg’s individual achievements as a writer, as if some of the praise is new to him and being heard for the first time. This is no pose – while artistically talented, Erland is not an intellectual in the sense that his late son was. The father’s artistic skills lie in the visual realm; he is a strikingly talented artist, a skill that he has maintained over the years and he has made a particularly charming and understated drawing of his own late son. He is also, as we shall see, a man who has vigorously divided opinion in the posthumous battle over his son’s legacy.

In London, a month before the UK release of Stieg Larsson’s second novel,
The Girl Who Played with Fire
, Erland Larsson spoke about the author’s childhood. Inevitably, he was asked about Stieg’s early reading, and he pointed out that both he and his wife were keen that Stieg should have a close relationship with books. By the age of 13 or 14, Stieg had consumed Selma Lagerlöf’s
The Ring of the Löwenskölds
, a book which also captivated Stieg’s brother Joakim, despite the fact that it was not something that Erland had himself read. This novel is interesting for its parallels with Larsson – like him, Selma Lagerlöf was holding down a full-time job (in her case as a teacher in a high school for girls in Sweden) while she was writing her first book. A particular concern for her was the folklore and historic traditions of Sweden – not concerns of Larsson – but the attempt to anatomise the soul of the country in fiction is not dissimilar. And
The Ring of the Löwenskölds
is a trilogy, in which we are allowed to know more about the characters as the books progress – a technique utilised by Larsson.

Erland pointed out that he and his wife were admirers of the highly influential crime novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, which contain clearly expressed socialist agendas, as well as (in total contrast) the right-wing, bone-crunching detective fiction of Mickey Spillane. Erland remarked that he wasn’t sure that these parental tastes had been taken up by his son, but it might be argued that elements in these very different writers are in fact freighted into the
Millennium Trilogy
: the political elements that were such a key factor of the remarkable series of novels by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and the unabashedly grisly violence of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer books – even though the violence is used to very different ends in the
Millennium Trilogy
than in
I, The Jury
or
Kiss Me Deadly
.

While always polite and friendly, I found Erland Larsson to be guarded around English writers such as myself – understandably so, perhaps, given the growing waves of journalistic disapproval that were beginning to engulf him because of the contentious issue of his late son’s legacy. But as I shared with him an interest in art and illustration, he relaxed after a few minutes and gave frank answers to my questions about his son. While noting with regret that children today spend far more time on computers than they do reading, he speculated that Stieg’s interest in journalism may have been prompted – as it was in so many young people of his generation – by the Vietnam War. But this early politicisation went along with the dedicated work ethic that was to prove so central to his life, and, possibly, so injurious to his health when combined with his excessive lifestyle.

‘When Stieg was 12,’ said Erland, ‘I read a novel he had written in a notebook. It was then that we gave him a typewriter – it was for his thirteenth birthday and I remember it was very expensive at the time. It was also very noisy, so we had to make space for him in the cellar. He would write in the cellar and come up for meals, but at least we could sleep at night.’

According to his father, Stieg’s interest in journalism, and the possibility that he might make a living from it, came at the same time as his growing involvement in Vietnam issues.