Tome: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Stieg Larsson's first book in the Millennium trilogy is a curious hybrid.

One the one hand, it's a corporate thriller about the attempts of discredited journalist Mikael Blomkvist to expose the shady financial dealings of corporate financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.

On the other, it's a riff on the traditional village-based murder mystery canonised by Agatha Christie, as Blomkvist is hired by industrialist Henrik Vanger to uncover the mystery behind the disapperance of his grand-niece almost 40 years ago from the sleepy hamlet of Hedeby.

Meaning, it may be set deep in the Scandinavian hartlands and feature characters with names like Lisbeth, Mikael and Hans-Erik, but at heart, The Girl With The Dragon tattoo is thoroughly English in it's murder mystery and wholly American in it's thriller elements of serial killing and corporate skull-duggery.

Trouble is, it doesn't transcend it's dog-eared antecedents to deliver anything remotely refreshing.

The mystery sets up a deliciously traditional framework of a sprawling, squabling and nasty family most likely neck-deep in collussion in the disappearance of one of their own. But Larsson never exploits this by giving any of them significant roles. The 2 thoroughly unpleasant members of the Vanger clan, Henrik's ex-Nazi brother Harald and Isabella, Harriet's cold and calculating mother are reduced to cameos.

And when the mystery morphs into a serial killer tale replete with torture room basements that climaxes with a most unsatisfactory end for it's depraved antagonist, it's hard not to wonder what the fuss over this book is all about.

Once the Harriet Vanger mystery is resolved, the book then switches gear for the next 100 pages to detail Blomkvist's elaborate plan to take down Wennerstrom, a plot thread resolved equally unsatisfactorily.

What keeps this 600 page tome (barely) afloat are it's 2 leads.

Blomkvist is an amiable protagonist with an enviable talent of getting women, be it much married colleagues, 53 year old headmistresses or rebellious hackers dropping their knickers within days of coming into contact with his genial, easy-going and non-judgemental demeanour.

The titular girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander is deeply scarred, sociopathically obsessed with control and a gifted researcher possessing a violent temper. She is the book's only fleshed out and intriguing character and her troubled past is something I hope Larsson has expanded on in the subsequent 2 books.

Larsson's agenda seems clear given his tendency to open each of the book's various sections with a statistical bulletin on female abuse in Sweden and the fact that apart from Blomkvist and males above 70, men come off as world-class turds in his book. (The book's Swedish tile is "Men Who Hate Women"). But one sincerely wishes that the sermonising came in a more attractive package.

A mystery that never quite engages and a thriller that doesn't quite thrill, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo doesn't kick-off the Millenium Trilogy on a high note.

One hopes the subsequent installments are an improvement.

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Tome: The Cold Six Thousand

The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
James Ellroy's second volume in his USA Underworld trilogy follows the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination and culminates in the killing of his brother Robert and Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King. Once again told through a 3-man arc (returning American Tabloid alumni Pete Bondurant and Ward Littell and newcomer Wayne Tedrow Jr.), The Cold Six Thousand, is a massive, demanding read, hardly helped by Ellroy's pared-to-the-bone prose and a plot that isn't so much labyrinthine as it is a literary hydra, where the closure of one strand merely results in the sprouting of 2 more cogs in an incredibly complex wheel of murky dealings, shady alliances and tangled sexual politics.

Ellroy's massive, grimy canvas now takes in the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, the former exploited by nefarious CIA operatives to run a drug manufacturing and exporting enterprise, with profits being funneled into training camps for mercenaries to for yet another planned Cuba invasion to topple Fidel Castro, while the latter prompts the ever-scheming J.Edgar Hoover to launch a cointelpro to discredit the movement.

Mixed into this turbulent stew is Wayne's misplaced hatred of Black people and it's attendant guilt when his wife is brutally murdered by a black felon he let escape, Ward Littell's gradual unraveling by guilt and remorse over his collussion with Hoover to discredit King and the Mob to fleece the reclusive Howard Hughes in Las Vegas and Pete Bondurant's gradually disintegrating marriage to Barb Cathcart.

Not the easiest of reads but a must for fans of Ellroy's revisionist American History and it's deeply flawed facilitators.


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