Book Reviews: The Millennium Trilogy by Stieg Larsson – (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc.)

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This trilogy is a real page-turner for its entire three volumes of some 2,100 pages. I loved it and couldn’t put the books down. Written by the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson, the stories are murder mysteries, spy stories and pure thrillers, with courtroom drama and some unforgettable characters. It has a strong moral sense and is refreshingly feminist in that it features many extraordinarily intelligent and strong female characters. (I will try not to spoil the plotlines in this review, giving just enough detail to hopefully hook you on the books.)
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Larsson originally wanted the entire trilogy to be named Men Who Hate Women, because that is one of the major threads. The Swedish publishers did keep that name for the first Swedish novel (and the first Swedish film, based on the first volume, was also named that). The English language publishers named them: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which I will refer to as Vol. 1), The Girl Who Played with Fire (Vol. 2), and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (Vol. 3). It is called The Millennium Trilogy because the fictitious Swedish monthly journal Millennium is always close to the center of the action with its investigative journalist/publisher Mikael Blomkvist and its editor-in-chief Ericka Berger.
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The “girl” in the English titles is Lisbeth Salander – and what a character she is. She is small, looking like an anorexic teen when she is in her mid-twenties, and she is socially incompetent, deeply introverted, sticking to her own private world and mistrusting almost everyone else (except for her peers in “Hacker Republic”). Damaged goods. What most people around her do not realize about Lisbeth is that she has areas of pure genius. She has a photographic memory and has incredible abilities with computer technology. She is a world class hacker – “probably the best in Sweden”. She works as a researcher for a top-of-the-line private security company in Stockholm, whose boss says she is by far the best researcher he has ever seen.
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Lisbeth Salander is her own worst enemy when it comes to her personal PR. Her social incompetence makes her appear extremely rude. She comes off as offensively punk, tattooed, pierced, dressing very goth, and wearing lots of black make-up. She scowls, but if she ever gives her “crooked smile,” then look out, because some major shit may come down and someone will pay dearly. Even one of her greatest friends and defenders was surprised at her appearance at her own trial; he thought: “She reminded him of a vampire in some pop-art movie from the ‘60s.” (Vol. 3).
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You do not ever want to piss Lisbeth Salander off. Her revenge can be very exacting. Salander has a history of violence from her earliest school days through her teens, and, although she uses violence only in self defense, she is stereotyped as crazy and locked up in a children’s psych hospital when twelve years old. (However, there is an interesting back-story to that that is developed later in Vol. 2.) She just wants to be left alone, but various miscreants – representatives and hirelings of the state in particular – continue to oppress her. Even at her transition to adulthood at 18 she is still shackled by being declared legally “incompetent” and therefore under the complete control of a legal “guardian” appointed by the state.
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Yet we will see that Salander’s childhood institutionalization and her later guardianship status is actually orchestrated behind the scenes by shadowy police intrigues dating back from the Cold War era, and her rights as an individual have been trampled further by dumb bureaucracy and by the psychiatric industry. She has been horrendously mistreated.
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Author Stieg Larsson was a great feminist, an advocate for women’s rights, dignity and security. (It is said that at age 15 he witnessed a gang rape of a young teenage girl, and he never forgave himself for not doing something – anything – about it at the time; a haunted author.) His female characters are intelligent, passionate and strong-willed. Especially “the girl,” Lisbeth Salander, whose story is central.
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But we also meet other great heroines, such as Ericka Berger, an intelligent, super-competent and confident woman who is editor-in-chief of Millennium magazine. (The Swedish films of the trilogy, while being great adaptations, do not do complete justice to Ericka’s courage and integrity in the books; but in the first English language film so far, actress Robin Wright seems to be portraying Ericka as Larsson envisioned her.)
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There are other heroines in the novels. Monica Figuerola, who is not only an intelligent, beautiful, super physically fit law enforcement officer but also is a key investigator within a small secret police department that is responsible for protecting the integrity of Sweden’s constitutional rule of law. Sonja Modig is a Stockholm cop who independently thinks outside the box. Suzanne Linder is an ex-cop who specializes in private security and takes no nonsense from bad guys, showing them no mercy. If the English language film sequels follow as I hope, Embeth Davitz will be playing Annika Blomkvist Giannini in the third film. (I recently read a review of the trilogy by Mario Vargas Llosa, and he also delights in these strong female characterizations.)
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Mikael Blomkvist is the heroic investigative journalist with immense integrity, idealism, devotion and drive. Lisbeth Salander laughs at him as a boring “do-gooder,” while she is slowly admitting her growing respect for him as a professional and as a friend. Blomkvist has an interesting – and quite exhausting – sex life. Women, quite simply, like him, and he has an impressive array of lovers. He is a decent man, a moral man, and women tend to feel safe with him as well as appreciated by him. He makes no promises to anyone and is always honest, but women pull him into the sack remarkably often. To get his work done, he often must hide in unknown places – a very rough life! (Daniel Craig is very well suited to the English language movie role, although none of the movies have nearly as much bedroom action as the books.)
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Blomkvist’s love life fits in with Sweden’s famous sexual libertarianism. If it is between consenting adults, well then it’s none of your business – neither yours nor the state’s. Blomkvist and Ericka Berger have been “best friends” and “occasional lovers” for 25 years, and, although it destroyed Blomkvist’s earlier attempt at marriage to another woman who eventually could not accept his infidelities with Ericka, Berger’s husband (who is bisexual) accepts his wife’s affair with no problems. Ericka is deeply in love with two men.
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This attitude is libertarian because it is entirely consensual and laissez faire. Lisbeth Salander’s love life is totally off all maps. Larsson defends all sexual preferences between consenting adults: hetero, LGBT, etc.
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Looking at the three novels here, Vol. 1 is a murder mystery and an intro to some of the main characters. Vol. 2 continues with our characters pursuing an entirely new murder mystery involving journalistic investigations into coercive sex trafficking of young foreign women into Sweden as unwilling prostitutes. Lisbeth’s history is unearthed, e.g., how she “played with fire.” Vol. 3 is a seamless sequel from Vol. 1 and 2, in which we meet Cold War rogues in Lisbeth’s background and the Swedish secret police. The Hacker Republic is introduced, a loose, worldwide, internet-connected community of hackers who defend their own. There is a classic courtroom trial in which all of Lisbeth’s loyal friends are involved. It is a fantastic series.
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Political and philosophical stuff: (my opinions):
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The nanny state is the government insisting that it knows best how to take good care of you, whether you want that care or not. There are moments when the horror show of bureaucratic tyranny overwhelms me. Larsson strongly criticizes the real-life infringements made on individuals’ autonomy and rights by the legal institution of Guardianship that victimizes his fictional Lisbeth.
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He also criticizes coercive psychiatric institutionalization – shades of Thomas Szasz, as a good libertarian friend has reminded me. Szasz is a Hungarian-American psychiatrist who has argued against such state incarceration. (One of my greatest uneasy guilty actions is the fact that I worked many years on locked psychiatric wards, a turnkey lording over legally coerced patients officially labeled with “mental illness.” Someday I will address such guilty memories in more detail.)
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Self-defense. Mace pepper spray is an “illegal weapon” throughout Sweden, yet professional journalist and editor Ericka Berger carries it. She says, “I’ll be damned if I’m going to run around alone at night without some sort of weapon.” She is an independent woman and intends to remain so.
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Later, Ericka has her house broken into by a scary, threatening weirdo who may return at any time. The police are not even interested or helpful. She is completely alone at this time, so she positions golf clubs in the house as possible defensive weapons if he returns. She is later informed by police that in Sweden if you kill an intruder breaking into your own home you will be charged with manslaughter; if you admit that you had fore-armed yourself (with golf clubs) it could be charged as murder. That is insane!
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Free Will. Lisbeth Salander had been bullied by the state for her entire life, with her rights violated systematically. Her family upbringing was violently dysfunctional. Yet she declares several times that environmental influences are no excuse. A couple of times she says that: “There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibilities.” According to a non-political, specialized philosophical usage of the word “libertarian” – relating instead to ethical-epistemological issues of Free Will – Lisbeth is a libertarian: we choose and are responsible. (I would also call her a political libertarian, if indeed she could be said to be political at all; she is probably in the individualist-anarchist camp of libertarian theory.)
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A note on the film adaptations of the trilogy. The three Swedish language films are excellent. Although they had played at a small venue in Bangkok, I never saw them then because I knew nothing about the story. I only paid attention when it was announced that Daniel Craig would star in an English version, and then I read the trilogy and eventually got the Swedish DVDs. The English version was also excellent, and I look forward to the sequels. The Swedish actress Noomi Rapace was very good in her original screen role as Lisbeth, and I am glad to see that she has more film roles coming her way now. But I think that Rooney Mara portrayed a Lisbeth that was closer to the books. This is because Mara is younger, smaller and more vulnerable looking. Rapace looks like a true ass-kicker, and for that reason I cannot picture her as easily being the victim in the first film. But all the films thus far are all great, adding up to one great body of work in literature and film.
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(Immediately following below is a very long review of the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Philosophy, 2012, ed. by Eric Bronson.)
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-Zenwind.
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