The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Lots to say, not enough time to say it.

Thought I'd carve out a little time for a book review. Considering that I don't finish a lot of books these days and the lack of writing overall I've been doing I thought I'd do up something quick on the topic.

I finished "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" last night. You've probably heard of it. It's a murder mystery with a lot going on for it. Written by the late Stieg Larsson it's already an international bestseller, seen one set of movies made about the trilogy and has another trilogy coming up by David Fincher. The protagonists, such as they are, are Mikael Blomkvist, a finance reporter, and Lizbeth Salander a PI/hacker of considerable talent. While there's certainly a lot to roll your eyes about, possibly because the novel was written in swedish, possibly because it tries pretty hard to impress the reader with descriptions of the "bleeding edge" tech from 2004, the story is well crafted and Lizbeth especially I found to be an extremely endearing character.



The original title of the book was "Men Who Hate Women". This theme is explored in a great deal of depth through the novel from men who taken women for granted to men who have a pathological, violent hatred for women. One of the things that struck me when I finished reading the novel was the level to which even the most likable characters treated the women in their life as objects. There are definitely a lot of feminist undertones and some of them are blatant and exaggerated for the purposes of the murder mystery storyline but others are more subtle.

Lizbeth's character plays an interesting dual role of awkward social misfit and badass heroine. She's a women of strong character, though physically she is short and scrawny and treated by nearly everyone as weak and frail. Lizbeth's "power" is in her technical prowess and ability to break down and analyze any situation. She is formally a private investigator but not like the stereotypes from the 30s and 40s. She's really more of a researcher. The idea of a compelling murder mystery focused around a financial journalist and a research assistant is kind of laughable but the characters are developed out of these pigeonholes in a satisfying way so when the story focuses on their jobs you're willing to go along for the ride.

Most of the story focuses on Blomkvist who is pretty much a perfect balance to Lizbeth. He's likable enough, exuding many fatherly traits and being extremely savvy when it comes to politics and socializing, but I'd sum his flaws up as "he's too amazing". It's hard to feel very connected to him when he's just so much better than everyone else at everything. His relationship with Lizbeth is, however, interesting and progresses through it's own sub-plot that takes you through a good spectrum of emotions.

The heart of the novel is the search for a murderer who has gone uncaught for 40 years. There's quite a lot of setup where we're introduced to Blomkvist's life which is falling apart because he was investigating a shady business man and was set up to take the fall in a libel case. Lizbeth is working as a PI but is a ward of the state due to her intense distrust of humanity and authority in specific. She's seen as borderline retarded by many of her caseworkers and they exert their power over here which leads to an intensely uncomfortable rape scene that in as clear terms as possible establishes that Lizbeth Salander is not someone you fuck with. Blomkvist ends up being approached by a wealthy businessman who sympathizes with his situation and offers him a job researching a murder in his family. After some convincing, Blomkvist agrees to take the job and enters into a world of family politics, secrets and quite a lot of sex.

There's a lot of odd detail in the novel including an account of how much hard-drive space and ram a NEW MACBOOK PRO has and how you should always use PGP to encrypt your emails and a whole slew of other oddly specific and at this point extremely dated tech terms. There's also an odd stiffness to some of the writing that might be a result of the translation. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know enough about Swedish to be able to say one way other the other whether the writing would have been fine. There's also quite a few places where things magically fall into place either by luck or some other deus ex machina. I wasn't expecting the most innovative plot and sure enough there are several moments when I had to stop and wonder how many magically convenient solutions were going to be used before I was through.

Aside from these small issues The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is still a decent story filled out by great characters. It gripped me and I think I'll be reading the next two books as soon as time allows.

Other then the