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More to these thrillers than piercings and paranoia
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November 12, 2009
By Theresa Smith
As unlikely protagonists go, Lisbeth Salander is right up there with Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant in the unfluffy stakes.
Pale, skinny, tiny and tattooed, Salander looks like "she had just emerged from a week-long orgy with a gang of hard rockers".
Unusually intelligent, but with an extreme dislike for dealing with authority, she's an investigative specialist working for a Swedish security firm.
Totally not a people's person, she is a lodestone for all sorts of trouble in Stieg Larsson's best selling Millennium trilogy - the third of which, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, has just been published in English.
While Salander herself realises that she lacks imagination and really doesn't understand how to make friends, watching plenty of TV medical dramas like Grey's Anatomy means an observant reader will twig Aspergers Syndrome early on, but that's only mentioned in the third book.
So as not to scare a potential reader away, Salander is nicely balanced by Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist almost too good to be true.
Clever, honest and principled, he is considered left-wing because as a financial journalist he specialised in investigative reporting about corruption and shady transactions in the corporate world.
The two get to know each other in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, in which Salander puts her skill as a hacker to good use helping Blomkvist find a murderer.
At the same time he ends up writing a story exposing a Swedish businessman as a money launderer for suspect enterprises.
A Swedish literature fan will delight in the references to Pippi Longstocking and Kalle Blomkvist, and not be surprised by the author's admission to being influenced by Astrid Lindgren.
Not all journalists make good authors. Too good an imagination and you never learn how to stick to the facts, too little imagination and you never learn how to use adjectives creatively.
Larsson didn't have a problem, though. A full-time journalist and political activist, he nevertheless found time to write three books, work out a fourth and plan another two.
Unfortunately, we won't get more than just these three since he died before the first one was even published. (Subsequently he was deemed the second highest selling author globally behind Khaled Hosseini in 2008.)
The trilogy books are well-paced, tightly written and detailed crime thrillers which give us an insight into the idiosyncrasies of Swedish life. Not only are the books wonderfully atmospheric (you can practically taste the rye bread) but they also give an honest assessment of investigative journalism.
The Swede's take on the ethical standards of financial journalists and journalists at large will make the more truthful of us squirm as he talks about how journalists sometimes take the easier route when writing a story instead of seriously interrogating the subject matter at hand because of lack of knowledge, time or motivation. He scrutinises the changing world of journalism even more thoroughly in books two and three.
Stieg - through the experiences of Blomkvist's sometime editor, sometime lover but always close friend, Erika Berger - gives an embarrassingly frank and accurate description that fits media newsrooms the world over.
Like all big business, newspapers too have become beholden to the bottom line in that profits are not used to benefit the people who work for the company, but the shareholders' pockets.
This is at the expense of journalistic standards which now owe more to the allegiances of the company than the standards of truth, justice or just plain doing the right thing.
In book three she has to remind a talented cub reporter: "Your job description as a journalist is to question and scrutinise most carefully. And never to repeat claims uncritically, no matter how highly placed the sources..."
Her attempts to explain to the newspaper management that cutting staff even further only leads to an even smaller newspaper, dropping readership and hence a drop in advertisers simply elicit blank stares. Sounds familiar?
The second book - The Girl Who Played With Fire - sees Salander accused of a triple murder and Blomkvist trying his damnedest to figure out what's going on.
It ends on a nailbiting note which the third immediately dives into, eventually panning out as a truly fast-paced denouement.
Yet, for all that the third book is the tying up of a snappy crime story plot filled with dastardly political machinations and clever historical references to something that might really have happened, it is all the more demanding and incisive for containing one little sentence: "When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it's about violence against women and the men who enable it."
In fact, the first book's Swedish title is M228n som hatar kvinnor which directly translates to "Men who hate women".
Though it comes pretty late in the storyline, this one little sentence will make you go back and re-assess all the derring-do, thrills and spills.
It's not only Salander's experience of the social welfare system that's meant to care for her - but doesn't - but also the chilling statistics quoted throughout the second book that shows just how casually women come off second-best and how easily it gets shrugged off.
While it is the Swedish legal and social welfare systems as they pertain to children and people in need of care that come under scrutiny and fail to impress, the basic premise extends too easily to systems the world over.
Berger's concomitant experience in the newsroom translate to too many corporate boardrooms.
Salander asks a particularly pertinent question when she wonders why Berger is told "if you can't rejuvenate this paper, nobody can" but is then simply stonewalled at every turn with patronising smiles from men who believe she should not worry her pretty little head about financial matters.
In fact Larsson takes it further when he contends that criminal justice systems are simply not set up to handle the criminals who make money from the sex trade and the trafficking of women.
Larsson's own real life (albeit post-mortem) experience rather sordidly illustrates his point of the hegemony of the male viewpoint to the detriment of that of the female.
Since he died intestate, Swedish law dictates that the money goes to his father and brother, with nothing for his long-term partner Eva Gabrielsson. (The two never got married because it would have necessitated making their addresses known... there were security concerns. As a journalist and political activist who documented and exposed Swedish extreme right and racist organisations, he'd been threatened several times and reportedly lived for years under death threats.)
When your viewpoint of the world is that of the person in power - male - it's really difficult to see why women whine about not being equal when you yourself don't see it that way because you don't understand what it means to not have the power.
So, for Larsson to actually make a coherent argument that all is not right in the world is quite compelling.
His argument that now is the time that we need competent and fearless journalists to highlight the iniquities of those in power or even more people will be exploited and left voiceless, is good, but unfortunately preaches to the converted.
What's really great about these books, though, is that all of this comes through strongly, but as only a small part of the unfolding story.
At the same time as making a strong statement about mankind's inability to do something about looking down on half the world's population, the books are couched in the vocabulary of a cracking good read of fiction with scary serial killers, punk chicks who take no nonsense, principled people who take a stand and just enough techno-babble to make it sound really cool.
The three novels in the Millennium trilogy are published by Quercus. The latest, The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest, is R160; the other two are each R119.70. More book news and reviews in the Tonight entertainment supplement.
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