Looking at secular books

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
(Book 1 in the Millennium Trilogy)
By Stieg Larsson. MacLehose Press. 572 pages. £7.99
ISBN 978 1 847 242 532

Please don’t write and complain about this review! I am not commending this book, or the rest of the Millennium Trilogy.

But I do think Christians should think about this highly successful series of dark thrillers. In Denmark, they have outsold all other books except the Bible and, in the US, Stieg Larsson was the first author to achieve over one million e-book sales.

The plot begins with a 30-year-old mystery: the disappearance of a teenager on a Swedish island. This classic locked-room detective story quickly develops into a hunt for a sadistic serial killer who, it is clear, is still on the loose. The novel climaxes in an almost comic action-film scene involving a torture chamber, a noose and a golf club, but then rumbles on as various loose threads are tidied up.

Distressingly graphic

Thrown into the mix are sub-plots of Swedish Nazi collaboration and high-powered financial intrigue. I did want to know who-dunnit (at least, I found it more gripping than my washing up, although the translation is clunky and the writing far from elegant), but I nearly gave up because of distressingly graphic descriptions and of sexual violence. Now, I know you can’t have a thriller without a murder. However, it seems that paying so much attention to the crime moves our sympathy away from the victim and our interest away from the plot. Such descriptions stray very close to titillation.

As with most crime fiction, the character of the detective is what keeps the reader wanting more, and I am sure this is the case with this series. Lisbeth Salander (the tattooed girl of the title) has been hailed a brilliant creation, and smooth Mikael Blomkist, her sometime partner, is a good foil for her spikiness. On the whole, I found neither convincing, but could understand the appeal of both to this generation of readers. Both are ethical crusaders of a sort. Both, too, are morally delinquent and dysfunctional, operating in a very dark world.

Larsson clearly aimed the book to be part of his crusade against the oppression of women; he places statistics about current violence against women at the head of each chapter, and all the horrors in his books are perpetrated against women — in fact, the title of the novel in Swedish is ‘Men who hate Women’. The contrast to oppression, he seems to suggest, is the casual sex his heroes indulge in. Reflecting our culture, the well-documented link between promiscuity and abuse is ignored; women are liberated but not protected, and so become more vulnerable than before. This purportedly feminist novel diminishes women.