The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Thirty-six years after the disappearance of his grand-niece, elderly Swedish industrialist Henrik Vanger hires disgraced financial reporter Mikael Blomkvist to solve the mystery under the guise of writing a family history. Blomkvist is investigated – and later assisted – by Lisbeth Salander, an enigmatic young computer hacker. The more the Blomkvist uncovers, the more danger his discoveries put him in.



Published posthumously and now adapted into a movie, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo couldn’t have asked for a bigger profile. There’s a lot that can be said about it, good and bad, which already gives it a one-up on some titles topping the best-sellers lists.


First, the good: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo has an engrossing central mystery and a number of tantalizing tangents (Blomkvist’s love life, Salander’s shady past, Swedish corporate malfeasance, etc.) that give it some breadth. The late author Steig Larsson was a political reporter and his adroitness as a researcher is evident here. The book has a tight chronology and a keen sense of verisimilitude with regard to contemporary Sweden.


While all this suggests Larsson was probably terrific as a nonfiction author, his debut mystery reveals him to be somewhat inept as a novelist. Structurally, this is a mess. The pacing is uneven, the point-of-view occasionally undergoes radical shifts, and the Salander thread is utilized inconsistently throughout. Instead of alternating Blomquvist and Salander chapters, she will disappear from the action for good-sized chunks of the novel, relegating her to the status of a secondary character despite her importance to both the plot and title.


Characterization on the whole is problematic. Blomkvist is neither unbelievable nor unsympathetic, but he comes off as too much of a Mary Sue (or would that be Marty Stungren, in this case), a blatant stand-in for the author. Salander is considerably less believable, and despite her evocative, contradictory nature, not as complex as she should be. She’s the Damaged Girl, through and through. The rest of the cast ranges from one-dimensional pastiches of the spoiled rich to genuinely compelling characters, such as Blomkvist’s beleaguered colleague/friend/lover.


The writing is similarly a mixed bag. There are some nice descriptions of the icy countryside, but plenty of placed where the prose felt stale. As this is an English adaptation of a Swedish book, it’s hard to tell what got lost in translation.


At 460 pages, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo isn’t a huge tome, but it often feels bloated. It’s talky, we get more Vanger family history and Swedish economic miscellanea than we really need to know, and there are too many character names to keep track of. All of this could be taken as Larsson shoring up his foundation, but it really detracts from the tension.


Lastly, Larsson’s anti-capitalist, anti-religious views cast a big shadow on the book. That wouldn’t be such a problem if they didn’t push plot developments into questionable directions. Larsson's determination to "get the bad guy" seems overly contrived in several instances.


For the most part, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is entertaining reading. It’s refreshing to see a mystery that doesn’t take place in some dense urban landscape populated by characters cut from the same hard-boiled cloth (amusingly, Blomkvist reads a number of mysteries throughout the book). And as a debut novel, it shows a lot of promise. However, the aforementioned technical deficiencies are impossible to ignore. It’s a shame Larsson didn’t live long enough to follow his Millennium Trilogy up with more polished and tightly constructed efforts. As such, we’re left with an occasionally enthralling, occasionally infuriating mess of a mystery tinged with fascinating sociopolitical overtones.


6.75/10