Everyone knows The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and its female "heroine" (if that is the right word for her), Lisbeth Salander. With the advent of the new film starring DanieI Craig, interest in the books is bound to have a resurgence.
In the first book of the Millennium Trilogy, Larsson presents us with an extremely tense story, a thriller involving family scandal and secrets and a fight for survival. It also deals with the need of disgraced journalist, Mikael Blomkvist to uncover the truth and get even with the man who tried to ruin him. Lisbeth and Blomkvist form an unlikely partnership to save themselves and others from a brooding evil.
The Girl Who Played With Fire - the premise
So how on Earth would Larsson follow that? Larsson has written a book that is equally as tense and uses his same two main characters, Salander and Blomkvist. This time, the book does not deal with a scandal; it deals with Salander and her past. On the periphery is a story of people-trafficking, girls used for sex and abused badly by the people who import them. The journalists investigating want the people involved to be outed especially as some of them hold positions of power within the very framework aimed to protect the vulnerable: the police and the justice system. They come to Blomkvist with the story and he aims to publish it.
Salander, meanwhile, is enjoying the fact that she has money and is using it to live a privileged life, travelling the world and buying expensive property, all under assumed aliases. The action of the book begins in Grenada and provides a relatively gentle opening to a terse thriller, showing Salander reasonably relaxed and indulgent. It is easy to detect that it will not last.
And it doesn't. Salander returns to Sweden and monitors Blomkvist remotely via his computer as all expert hackers would and delves into what he is reading, editing, investigating, only to discover that it has a deeply personal relevance to herself when she reads the name Zala.
The journalist, Eriksson and his girlfriend, Mia who is writing her doctorate on the sex trade and the women involved, are murdered brutally in their apartment and Salander is implicated. Incriminating evidence is found at the scene and the hunt for Salander begins, everyone involved assuming that she is guilty of the murders of Dag and Mia except for Blomkvist and a handful of others. When Salander's guardian is also discovered murdered in the same way, Larsson suggests that Salander is responsible but it just doesn't seem to be her style.
Action in The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
The action of the book involves uncovering the crucial detail of Salander's life up to the point that we meet her in the first book. We know that she was institutionalised and that she was deemed unable to live independently as she was a danger to herself and others around her. We know that Salander's mother was in a home and that she was no longer able to communicate with her daughter although Lisbeth continued to visit her.
What this book reveals to us is how all that happened and how Lisbeth seeks revenge against the perpetrator of violence against her and her mother. And the cause of this? Well, that would be telling. Needless to say, it is shocking and revolting and completely enlightens us on why Lisbeth feels so ruthless about punishing certain errant human behaviours.
As before, there is a lot of hacking; there are a lot of violent encounters; there are a lot of trust issues and the culmination of the book is one of the most shocking and imaginative ever. It is truly unbelievable and yet in his creation of such an unusual and unique character as Lisbeth Salander, paradoxically, it seems entirely credible.
What this book shows us ultimately is that Lisbeth Salander believes that people in authority are untrustworthy, hostile and unhelpful. And in her case it is true. Salander is a victim who has been abused by her native country and an enormous cover-up is still taking place to ensure that the truth never emerges, even at the expense of people's lives. Even, possibly, at the expense of Salander's life.
Larsson set himself a challenge when he decided to write a second book but he more than met it. He has easily created a smoothly written thriller with a complex plot and credible characters that propel you along so effortlessly through the text that before the reader knows it, the end of a great book has been reached.
Sources
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, London, MacLehose Press, 2008
The Girl Who Played With Fire, Stieg Larsson, London, MacLehose Press, 2009.
Rachel Deeming - Rachel is a mother of two boys, one 18 months old and the other a busy boy of four. She used to work until recently as an English teacher ...
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