The novelist Stieg Larsson may have been a radical journalist, but his view of Swedish society doesn’t look that radical to a reader familiar with the thriller genre.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. By Stieg Larsson. Vintage, 2008. 608 pages; $14.95. www.amazon.com.

The Girl Who Played with Fire. By Stieg Larsson. Vintage, 2009. 630 pages; $15.95. www.amazon.com.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. By Stieg Larsson. Alfred Knopf, 2010. 576 pages; $27.95. www.amazon.com.

The girl who captured 35 million readers:
Stieg Larsson’s debt to Tarzan

As Marge Murray observes elsewhere in BSR, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy is a helluva read. For one thing, Larsson is a master of the Edgar Rice Burroughs school of suspense.

Burroughs was a highly successful popular writer, best known for his creation of a central archetype of American culture, Tarzan of the Apes.  He maintained suspense by developing two plot lines in alternate chapters, with each chapter ending in a cliffhanger.

It’s a sure-fire formula if you can pull it off without irritating the reader. Larsson manages that difficult trick in both of the first two books in his trilogy.

In the third book, he achieves something even more difficult:  He makes committee meetings seem emotional and dramatic.

In the modern world, many critical decisions take place in committee meetings. But it’s hard to write about a committee meeting without sounding flat and dull.

Larson narrates his committee scenes almost entirely through dialogue, with an occasional stroke of sparse description, but he manages to capture the interpersonal conflicts that run beneath the surface and create dramatic tension. He keeps his suspense machine chugging away by making sure every meeting focuses on a development that will wield a significant impact on his characters.

Creative violence

Larsson’s heroine, Lisbeth Salander, could have been a standard asocial computer whiz, but she’s far more complex: an undersized young woman, with a childlike appearance, who prevails in physical combat thanks to a talent for ruthless, creative violence that would appall most of the computer hackers in her personal network. 

Her final act of violence involves an unexpected use of a staple gun and a clever, cold-blooded manipulation of the social and political factors in play.

The first book— The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo— is a cerebral classic mystery, punctuated by violence. Much of the plot development describes the slow accumulation of evidence, complete with lengthy discussions of its significance. 

The second is a true thriller, with Salander in mortal danger for most of its 630 pages. They’re both spellbinders, but the second— The Girl Who Played with Fire— is a particularly dangerous temptation for readers with tight time budgets.

The third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is more relaxed, its title notwithstanding. I could put it down at a reasonable hour, but I always looked forward to picking it up again.

A reflection on Sweden?

But does the trilogy really deliver a critique of Swedish society, as Marge Murray and many other commentators (including the Economist) suggest?

The thriller, by its nature, focuses on the uglier aspects of human life, but the descent into darkness is usually balanced by portraits of decent people who try to keep the savagery under control.  To someone familiar with the thriller genre (like me), Larsson’s overall picture of Swedish society looks no bleaker than the general picture of human society conveyed by most thrillers.

Larsson’s novels do depict vicious examples of male brutality to women, but several attractive male-female relationships offset the displays of masculine pathology. The relationship between the main male character, Blomkvist, and his editor, Erika Berger, is particularly appealing. They maintain the relationship because they find it sexually satisfying, but they like each other professionally and personally, and they stay on good terms with Berger’s husband.

Larsson’s cast includes women police, women lawyers and journalists and other highly competent female professionals. Many of them, like Blomkvist’s sister, seem to have reasonably satisfactory relationships with men.

Right-wing villains, and left

The ultimate villains in the trilogy come from two groups: the security police and the mental health profession. The first is a right-wing institution, the second generally appeals to the left.

There is no indication that either group is inherently corrupt.  Larsson makes it clear that the villains in the security police are a rogue unit within a necessary institution. Many of his police officers display a meticulous devotion to the Swedish constitution and the niceties of their relationship with the news media.

Lisbeth Salander is essentially a conservative figure. She holds no sympathy for the more liberal view of human nature she detects in Blomkvist. To her, some people are just bastards. Kill them and move on.

The real social message

If the Larsson trilogy has a social message, it is the danger of unchecked power. Any group, including the “helping professions,” can produce a menace if it isn’t watched and checked. The rogues are particularly dangerous when they’re convinced they’re helping others or pursuing some general good.

Larsson was a journalist, but he was obviously familiar with the thriller genre. When his characters relax with a book, they pick up thrillers and crime novels written by real writers with internationally recognizable names. 

Whatever his political intentions may have been, he gave his fellow readers the one thing a thriller writer is supposed to deliver: a high-tension experience created out of believable characters, suspenseful plot lines and the worldly knowledge he accumulated during an active, lamentably truncated life.♦


To read another commentary by Marge Murray, click here.