I took advantage of my paternity leave and reduced sleeping time (thanks to our newborn baby Evelyn) to finish reading Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, consisting of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The series was intended to consist of ten novels, but Larsson only completed three before his untimely death in 2004. The books he did finish are extremely popular and Larsson has received a lot of press so I’m not going to give a lot of background. However, after finishing the trilogy, I was somewhat baffled as to why it has become such a huge phenomenon, so I wanted to give my impressions.
The first book in the series, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, has a lot going on on its periphery, including journalistic intrigue and corporate espionage, but at its core, it’s essentially a locked-room mystery. It also differs from the later books in that the main characters of the series, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, are not integral to the central plot, having been brought in specifically to investigate a crime that occurred more than 40 years earlier. It starts off slow, but I found it to be a competently plotted and readable mystery novel.
The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest are actually two parts of the same story; neither of the two books would be a satisfactory read on its own, as Played With Fire is essentially 400 pages of plot set-up and Hornet’s Nest would be almost incomprehensible without having read this background. This reveals Larsson’s serious pacing problems, as almost nothing of consequence happens in Played With Fire until about 200 pages in, and the rest of the book is a slog as well. The division of the plot into two books makes the first book totally unsatisfying, as very little is resolved at the end. Meanwhile, Hornet’s Nest benefits in that Larsson has already established his characters and the plot, so the action kicks in relatively quickly. The plot of these two books derives directly from Blomkvist and Salander, and the story they tell is more of a government conspiracy/espionage/thriller tale than a mystery.
Larsson’s pacing in all three books also suffers due to his tendency to introduce way more characters than is necessary. Played With Fire and Hornet’s Nest are particularly troubled by this tendency, as he adds more and more policemen and women, journalists, and politicians, each of whom seemingly has to reflect on each plot development before anything else can happen. Since a lot of these characters have similar opinions about the plot developments, this leads to a lot of redundancy. I appreciate that he tried to move away from the idea that our hero and heroine are uncovering a massive government conspiracy on their own, which is unrealistic, and are instead relying on the cooperation of a wide range of sympathizers. However, the endless perspective changes are another element that slows these books down. Another one of Larsson’s annoying stylistic quirks that is exacerbated in the second and third books is his need to give the brand name of any product mentioned; Played With Fire includes literally two pages just listing the Ikea products that Salander purchases to decorate her new apartment.
Most of the supporting characters don’t really add much to the stories; Larsson has a pretty black-and-white sense of morality, and so nearly all of the characters are either completely good or completely bad, and aren’t really defined by much else. Once you learn that Larsson was the editor of a left-wing Swedish magazine, it’s hard not to read the hero, Mikael Blomkvist, as transparent wish-fulfillment: he’s a decent-looking middle-aged guy in average shape who nevertheless has sex with multiple female characters in each book (including one who has a special arrangement with her husband allowing her to have sex with Blomkvist whenever she wants, just because their sexual attraction is so powerful); in addition, his magazine, Millennium, is constantly breaking important and controversial news stories that threaten to bring down the corrupt establishment. The other main character, Lisbeth Salander, has a more complex, nuanced sense of morality. Salander is a borderline sociopath who is unwilling to deal with anyone in a position of authority and has a paranoid need to monitor the lives of everyone around her. She’s also willing to resort to violence to get what she wants. However, she also has a strong personal sense of what’s right and wrong. Salander is easily the most believable, intriguing character in the series, and (I think) a big part of its success.
Pacing aside, Larsson’s plotting is also a strength; the stories are intriguing and come to satisfying conclusions (if you count the second and third books as one story). However, I’m still not sure why the Millennium Trilogy has been so popular: the books are readable, but they aren’t particularly exotic or special, and I’m not sure why they have taken off so much more than any other mystery series. If I were working in reader’s advisory, I’d push Tana French’s In the Woods and The Likeness, which are better-written mysteries with more unique plots, over the Millennium Trilogy.
