top Best Book

The Girl who Played with Fire continues the story from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A year has passed since Lisbeth Salander saved journalist Mikael Blomkvist's life, and he hasn't really seen her since. They've both moved on: Salander has been travelling around the world, while Blomkvist is working on the next big thing at his magazine, Millennium.
The next big thing at Millennium is a themed issue about the sex trade, and that brings Dag Svensson to the magazine's offices, as he wants them to publish his exposé -- in book form --, naming names and revealing how ineffective Sweden's supposedly tough sex-trade laws are. Conveniently, his girlfriend, Mia Johansson, is working on her dissertation on the subject. Together, they are sitting on piles of explosive material -- just the thing for Millennium.
Meanwhile, Salander has finally come back to town, ready to settle down in Stockholm. Technically she is still under state guardianship, but she has an 'arrangement' with her appointed guardian, the sadistic creep Nils Erik Bjurman: he dutifully fills out his official reports and she won't make public the video of him raping his ward. She makes sure he sticks to his side of the bargain (to which there are also some other conditions), but Bjurman is getting fed up and has his own plans for escaping this trap.
Salander was a fascinating character in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but she wasn't in the spotlight for most of it; in The Girl who Played with Fire she is front and center, and that becomes more problematic. She was already a super-girl, with a photographic memory and unparalleled computer-hacking skills. The events covered in the previous novel have now also left her incredibly wealthy. Among the few things she bought herself over the past year was a pair of breasts, so that she didn't look quite so much like a young tomboy, but she remains a disturbing fantasy figure: "a strange girl -- fully grown but with an appearance that made her easily mistaken for a child". (She also got those tattoos removed: so much for that dragon tattoo .....).
Back in Stockholm, she buys an incredibly expensive and huge apartment (leaving eighteen (!) of its rooms unfurnished) and tries to settle in. Larsson enjoys describing every aspect of Salander's new life, but when he gets right down to bothering with what she buys the movers for lunch it can get to be a bit much: he's too enamored of this character he's created, which is all the more problematic since she is such an unrealistic figure. But it's Salander's past that continues to play an important part in the present; it defines her, and it still can add to the damage it has already caused her.
Larsson is a tease and only very slowly reveals what Salander's past involved. In drips and drabs he offers one horror after another -- but central, obviously, is something that happened when she was twelve, something referred to as "All The Evil". It is some mysterious event which few know about and no official report about it can be readily found; it is even missing from the police files. Larsson refers to it repeatedly throughout the book -- but, in a transparent effort to maintain a sense of tension, gives little clue as to what was involved. He does this very badly: the effort is so transparent -- the mentions are obviously for teasing, tension-maintaining effect -- that it only serves to annoy the reader.
Things come to a head sooner rather than later when, shortly after Salander drops by sex-trade experts Dag and Mia's place (she's been keeping tabs -- via computer hacks -- on everyone from her former employer to Millennium, which is how she learned about the couple), the two are found shot. Oh, and then Bjurman is, too.
Salander is the obvious prime suspect, and soon is on the run (not that she had announced her presence very publicly before -- no one even knows about her new apartment, and few are aware that she is back in Stockholm). Her story is plastered all over the Swedish media -- she is: "public enemy number one". Meanwhile, the fact that Dag and Mia's exposé of the sex trade might be a good motive for murder takes a while to catch on, even for the likes of Blomkvist.
Because she is a cartoon supergirl-figure, Salander can, of course, stay a step ahead of both the authorities and the bad guys. The fact that she has a couple of people in her corner -- Blomkvist, her former (now invalid) guardian, her former employer, a boxer ... -- is a bit of a help, but since she has these trust issues that make it hard for her to let anyone help her putting all the pieces together is not as simple or straightforward as it might be. And, for example, her former employer's well-intentioned attempt to help actually causes more harm than good.
Ever-teasing, Larsson certainly doesn't let Salander come right out and proclaim her innocence; outrageously, also, after the focus had been on her so long, he abruptly shifts away from her when the murders go down, and it is many pages before Salander resurfaces -- and even longer before the nature of her interaction with Dag and Mia is cleared up (i.e. what, if any, was her role in their shooting ?).
The basic idea of the grand conspiracy that has set all this into motion -- and, in fact, that has made Salander into the screwed-up young woman she is -- is decent enough, but Larsson's roundabout way of revealing what is going on is rather awkward. Yes, there's compelling suspense, but this is no master of the genre at work here, as quite a bit of this is rather ham-fisted. And, as if unlikely supergirl Salander -- at 4'11''and 90 pounds a cartoon stick figure -- weren't enough, Larsson tosses another superhuman figure into the mix, a giant with rather remarkable physical qualities himself (and a surprise identity -- revealed, of course, only in one of the climactic end-scenes).
Then there are the convenient coincidences, of people being at places at just the right moment, and the inconvenient ones (telephone batteries dying out, etc.) .....
A too-good-to-be-true finale (in which Salander demonstrates yet more essentially superhuman qualities) at least does the right thing and reunites Salander and Blomkvist ("Kalle Fucking Blomkvist", as Salander affectionately refers to him) and sets the stage for volume three in their adventures, but ends unsatisfyingly abruptly. But, for the most part, there's not much left to tie up (killing people off is an efficient way of dispensing with that), and at least Salander's horrible past has now been revealed and Bjurman is gone from the scene. A few threads dangle -- what will happen to Millennium (as there is to be a change in administration) ? what's up with Salander's sister (who gets several mentions but remains unseen) ? -- but at least it looks like the characters can truly move on in the next installment. (Well, maybe not: Larsson makes a point of mentioning repeatedly how Salander was memorizing the names of those (journalists, interview-subjects, etc.) who were saying and writing things about her she did not like .....)
Larsson unleashes a fairly compelling story, but the writing is workmanlike at best (yes, this is a book which includes descriptions such as: "His hands were big as frying pans" ...) and the way in which information is revealed highly annoying. With its focus on Blomkvist and what he was uncovering, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo worked much better: here Salander is the central figure, and yet information she has is withheld by Larsson, for no reasonable reason. It's easy to see why Larsson is so enamored of Salander -- throughout The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, after all, one constantly wished to know more about her -- but, with her billions and her computing skills, she is a far less convincing figure here.
As in the first installment of the series, Larsson is eager to show what scum men often are in how they treat women -- through both the abuse Salander (and her mother) suffered, and the sex trade -- and he is especially keen to indict the government for not doing the right thing(s). It's a muddled message, here, however: what happened to Salander was, of course, criminal, but the circumstances are unusual, to say the least -- and the fact that she fell into the hands of the pathologically perverse also makes it seem more like an extraordinary situation than an everyday one. Meanwhile, the whole sex-trade business gets very short shrift, and ultimately feels like a topic-of-convenience (for the story) -- even though Larsson obviously feels very strongly about the issue.
The Girl who Played with Fire is a very readable thriller, but also a very flawed one.