The Man Who Left Too Soon by Barry Forshaw

Author:Barry Forshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781843584575
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2011-04-25T16:00:00+00:00

For Chapter 2, Larsson switches our attention to a café on Stureplan, and a nemesis of Salander’s. Nils Erik Bjurman is thinking about what Salander did to him. It’s another example of Larsson’s attitude to his own sex that those who undergo sexual humiliation of the kind they practise on women are splenetic forces of malevolence, bent on revenge at all costs. Bjurman, we remember, was a lawyer assigned to be Salander’s legal guardian. Salander was considered a promiscuous child and in need of protection. But Bjurman abused his position and raped her – and consequently Salander took her revenge on him by tattooing his crimes on his belly. A broken man, he gave up most of his clients and wrote fictitious, positive monthly reports on Salander – as she had stipulated. He sets about getting skin grafts to remove the tattoo. Salander had visited him in the middle of the night and blackmailed him with a DVD she had made of the rape: she is going away, but Bjurman must continue writing his reports as if she is still under his protection, or she will make public the DVD. From that moment on Bjurman has an overwhelming desire to destroy her – this galvanises him and gives his life a new purpose.

While Bjurman is bitterly remembering what Salander did, Mikael Blomkvist (unaware of the lawyer’s existence) passes him to join his editor-in-chief, and erstwhile lover, Erika Berger, at a nearby table. Blomkvist lights up a cigarette. Erika detests smokers – not a reliable indicator of her character, as the chain-smoking author might be expected to disagree with her – and makes a veiled reference to finding a lover who doesn’t smoke. She’s meeting childhood friend Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Rosenberg. We learn that Blomkvist is being sexually harassed by a work-experience girl, the daughter of one of Erika’s friends, who is only 17 (both Berger and Blomkvist are 45). This is something of a reversal of the serial sexual harassment practised by males in the books – but Blomkvist’s experience is more a nuisance than anything else.

His long-term affair with Berger began 20 years ago when she was a young journo. He radiates self-confidence and is entirely non-threatening, hence (as Larsson tells us) his attraction to the opposite sex (readers may argue with this as a rationale for the journalist’s extraordinary success with women). He prefers older women – Salander was an aberration. He doesn’t want a repeat of this entanglement with the media school graduate who is working at Millennium. She is clearly desperate for him (more Larsson wish-fulfilment by proxy?), and he doesn’t want to hurt her.

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