The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson by Barry Forshaw

Author:Barry Forshaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781843584575
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-04-25T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE BOOKS:

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

Atattooed young woman lies in intensive care, a bullet in her brain. A few rooms away is the man who has tried to kill her – her father. His body bears multiple axe injuries (inflicted by the young woman). If she recovers, she will face trial for three murders – but not if the man down the hall is able to kill her first.

There’s no arguing that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest hits the ground running, and the pace rarely lets up for an arm-straining 600 pages. It’s an exhilarating, if exhausting, read. But the book is also something very special, and unique, in the world of crime thrillers.

Once again, Stieg Larsson grabs our attention with his two protagonists: Lisbeth Salander and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who fights to clear her name – even though she dumped him as her lover. Salander’s numerous enemies here include some very nasty types, from her hideous father to equally murderous secret organisations and self-serving politicians. And these various nemeses all want her discredited – or dead. Larsson is unsparing in the area of grisly violence (one more characteristic – along with a vulnerable heroine – he shares with another bestselling author, Thomas Harris). But this is a strong and satisfying conclusion to a massively ambitious, richly detailed trilogy, and readers will regret that this is our last opportunity to share the invigorating company of Lisbeth Salander – until we watch the various films of the books.

The minute and detailed analysis of plot incident with which the first two books have been addressed seems not quite as appropriate here; not because there is less plot (in many ways the narrative is as densely packed as before), but because there is a trajectory in which individual incident is perhaps not as important than the rounding off of certain themes and notions about the central characters. Part One is entitled ‘Intermezzo in a Corridor’, and this musical allusion is certainly on the ironic side. The musical form employed throughout this book is largely accelerando with none of the languor of an intermezzo.

The chapter begins with a superscription concerning the hundreds of women who served during the American civil war disguised as men, and Larsson makes points about historians having difficulty dealing with gender distinctions. (His remark about women taking part in Swedish moose hunts has a certain unintended irony from a left-wing writer such as Larsson, when most readers’ image of a moose-hunting woman will be the extremely right-wing presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.) He goes on to discuss Amazons and warrior women, mentioning Boudicca, honoured with a statue in London on the Thames near Big Ben, and suggests that the reader ‘say hello to her if they pass by’. One might argue that his own warrior woman, Salander, is somebody one would be ill-advised to say a casual hello to. Particularly if you are a male who has been engaged in any inappropriate sexual activity.

The doctor,

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