Title: The Girl Who Played with Fire
Author: Stieg Larsson
ISBN: 9781847245564
Publisher: Quercus Publishing PLC
The Girl Who Played with Fire is the second book in the hugely popular Millennium trilogy by Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Since its original Swedish publication in 2006 the trilogy has enjoyed enormous success, the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, being published in English in 2008 and becoming an instant best-seller. Larsson, who died of a heart attack shortly after submitting the complete manuscripts of the trilogy to his publisher, was a “crusading author and liberal journalist”, and one might guess that he drew on his own experiences in the field of magazine publishing to create the fictional world of Millennium magazine, whence the trilogy takes its name. As with all great talents who die suddenly, the trilogy seems all the more poignant given the fact that it is Larsson’s only fictional work, published posthumously.
The popularity of the trilogy lies in Larsson’s character-driven narrative: protagonists Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, who joined forces in the first book in order to solve a particularly complex “closed room” murder mystery, are memorable for their unremitting pursuit of truth and justice for the oppressed. While the focus in Dragon Tattoo was financial investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist, the second novel is definitely centred on anti-social computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. The plot of the first book does not have significant bearing on the second, but it does serve to establish Salander’s antagonistic relationship with men, especially men who abuse their positions of power. In fact, the original Swedish title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo translates as “Men Who Hate Women”, and in The Girl Who Played with Fire, Salander is directly identified as the woman “who hated men who hate women”.
The Girl Who Played with Fire opens with a scene from Lisbeth’s past. She lies strapped down to a bed, fantasising about killing the sinister man who visits her to tighten her straps and wish her a happy thirteenth birthday. She imagines throwing a petrol bomb through his car window. This establishes the relevance of the title beyond the metaphorical meaning: Salander is a girl who really does play with fire. Back in the novel’s present, a brief Caribbean interlude establishes Salander as a fearless force of amoral retribution for offenders against women, after which the story proper takes off.
Independent Millennium magazine owners and editors Mikael Blomkvist and Erika Berger are approached by journalist Dag Svensson, who wants them to publish a book in which he exposes the illegal sex trade in Sweden, based on the doctoral thesis research findings of his girlfriend Mia. When Dag and Mia are found shot dead, police discover a weapon belonging to Lisbeth Salander’s guardian, Nils Bjurman. Bjurman also made an appearance in the first book when, assuming Lisbeth (who has been declared legally incompetent by a corrupt social and legal system) to be mentally handicapped and powerless, he viciously and repeatedly raped her on two occasions.
Having exacted her revenge for this rape, Salander is using the tape she made of the second rape to blackmail Bjurman. Lisbeth’s prints are on the gun and when Bjurman is also found with a hole in his head, the police launch a manhunt for Salander, who goes to ground in the palatial new apartment, with the name V Kulla on the nameplate, which she bought with money she stole in the first book from a corrupt industrial billionaire, using her computer-hacking super-power. The rest of the novel centres around the three simultaneous investigations into the murders. Good guys include, obviously, Blomkvist and Berger, as well as Salander’s previous employer, Dragan Armansky, head of a security firm, and Holger Palmgren, who was her guardian before a stroke incapacitated him and Bjurman was appointed in his place. Also fighting for truth and right are Criminal Inspector Jan Bublanski and investigator Sonja Modig, who struggle against the vanity of the investigation leader, Prosecutor Richard Ekström, in their attempts to find the real killer.
The forces of evil are represented by Advokat Nils Bjurman, who is desperate to avenge himself on Salander; a sex-and-drugs-trading motorcycle club; misogynist policemen; and corrupt politicians, journalists and secret police agents. The ultimate evil is the mysterious Zalachenko, a Russian defector protected by the secret police, who has some connection with a period in Salander’s life when “All The Evil” happened, and she was institutionalised in a psychiatric hospital for children. Zalachenko also has a giant, chainsaw-wielding henchman, whose presence makes for some exciting action scenes in the novel.
Larsson’s depiction of contemporary Sweden is bleak: a world in which corrupt men abuse their power; where anti-Semitism and racism are rife; where women are pitifully sidelined and abused; with a miserably inadequate social care system and a generally narrow social definition of normality that results in Salander being branded a psychopathic S&M lesbian satanist in the media. Indeed, it is clear that Larsson was certainly preoccupied with gender politics and women’s rights as the overarching theme in his trilogy.
The constant references to Swedish children’s writer Astrid Lindgren’s stories raises some interesting counterpoints. It is as though Larsson is imagining how contemporary Sweden would treat their much beloved trickster figure Pippi Långstrump – a nine-year-old girl with super-strength, who lives alone in Villa Villekulla, with a suitcase full of gold coins, and a monkey as companion, beyond the reach of adult interference. Like Pippi, Lisbeth Salander manages repeatedly to get the best of everyone who challenges her. However, she is embattled by a constant struggle against authority figures who wish to destroy and silence her. The revelations made in this book about Lisbeth’s past and her family also resonate in a peculiar and grotesque manner with Pippi’s story and her ultimate reunion with her long-lost father.
Salander is aided by Mikael Blomkvist, who, because of his reputation for relentless investigative journalism, and much to his chagrin, has been dubbed “Kalle” Blomkvist by the Swedish media. Kalle Blomkvist (Bill Bergson in English) is another of Astrid Lindgren’s fictional characters, a boy detective who solves mysteries that grown-ups cannot. In Dragon Tattoo, Blomkvist spent some time in jail after being sued for libel when he exposed corrupt industrialist Hans Wennerström, from whom Salander subsequently stole her fortune. Again, Larsson seems to be suggesting that characters like boy detective Kalle Blomkvist would not be heroes in contemporary Sweden, but would be sued and locked up in order to neutralise the threat which they pose to the (corrupt) interests of the forces of law and order.
While Salander and Blomkvist shared an intimate relationship in the first book, in the second, Salander is recovering from her heartbreak after having fallen for Blomkvist. She viciously severs all contact with him and, until the investigation into the murders is turned on her, absolutely refuses to acknowledge his existence. However, Blomkvist knows that she has access to his computer hard drive, and thus manages to communicate with her by leaving messages for her in a folder on his desktop. Their entire relationship throughout the second book takes place in cyberspace – they never speak face to face.
Salander’s ability to shape, shift and create/adopt virtual identities is an important part of what makes the character so memorable and appealing. She hardly exists as “Lisbeth Salander”, and the official records of “Lisbeth Salander” are at odds with the accounts of the few people who know her, much to the frustration of the police, who never manage to get a handle on her during the manhunt.
Salander is described in Dragon Tattoo as a redhead who dyes her hair black and changes her image by removing her piercings and modifying her style. When we encounter her at the beginning of Fire, she has undergone breast surgery and had a tattoo in her neck removed in order to be less easily recognisable. When she goes to interrogate a corrupt journalist with ties to the sex industry, he is terrified by her face, which has been painted and which he experiences as “a grotesque mask”.
In cyberspace she goes by the name Wasp, and is a respected member of a small community of elite hackers. She also has a false identity as “Irene Nesser”, a blond Norwegian, who “wore more discreet make-up than Lisbeth Salander”. Many reviewers liken Salander to Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, which is apt in the sense that she is an indestructible warrior woman, but also interesting, since Lara Croft is, after all, an avatar in a computer game.
This preoccupation with the manifestation of Salander’s avatars is one of the most interesting aspects of The Girl who Played with Fire. While the mash-up of genres and the over-the-top, manga-esque violence sometimes seem disjunctive and gratuitous, Salander is overwhelmingly compelling as a character. It is my opinion that her ability to have existing identities on several planes at once speaks to something in the reading public which is relevant for this particular moment and which goes some way towards explaining the success of the trilogy. Salander embodies and enacts the irreverence of a Pippi Longstocking who is what she is and who makes use of the preconceived ideas that others have of her to trick them and show them up.
The current popularity of characters such as television’s Dr House seems to attest further to this – the public loves impishly perverse characters who may remain beyond the law because of their super-powers, which in the case of both House and Salander manifest as an obsessive, almost autistic brilliance.
The success of the Millennium trilogy is that it is Pippi Longstocking for grown-ups – where we wanted to be Pippi or Kalle as children, we now want to be Lisbeth or Mikael, cleverly circumventing authority whilst having exciting adventures and ultimately revealing the truth to the world.