Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Books On Tape
Rating: worthy
For a review of the Swedish movie based on this novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes, see here
Review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
Review of The Girl Who Played With Fire.
This entire trilogy should have been called simply, "The Girl Who Kicks Ass", period! Although there is none of that in this volume. This one starts off exactly where the middle book of this trilogy ended: with Lisbeth Salander being whisked off to hospital with three bullets in her, still covered in the dirt from the grave where she had been buried, and Mikael Blomkvist being arrested by the most incompetent police officer since inspector Clouseau, and that's just the first chapter....
The police finally wise-up to the possibility that maybe Lisbeth isn't the lesbian satanist serial killer she's been portrayed as in the media, and Blomkvist wants to right wrongs whilst avoiding writing wrongs. He starts work on an article to be published in the next edition of Millennium magazine, the very mag which his partner, Erica, is leaving to take up a new high-powered position at a newspaper syndicate. Meanwhile the real villain, whom Blomkvist had trussed up like a turkey for the police, has escaped and both he and Zalachenko are gunning for Salander.
Which is a tragedy since Zalachenko is a patient in the same hospital as the debilitated Salander, and he's parked only three doors away from her! The police are so profoundly stupid that not a single one of them thinks of putting a guard on the doors of either of them, nor does Blomkvist think of suggesting it despite the fact that he's supposed to care deeply for Salander.
Meanwhile, the a segment of the Swedish security police (what there is of it) aka Säpo, is plotting to cover up this mess which has been humongous newspaper-grabbing headline material for months. Good luck with that! Säpo's plan involves a 78-year-old retired agent shooting Zalachenko in the hospital, and then committing suicide. It also involves breaking into Blomkvist's apartment to steal the extant copies of the document which could incriminate Säpo. Zalachenko finally gets nailed, and Blomkvist's sister is mugged. The Man From Säpo visits the senior prosecutor in charge of the case and fills his head with a bunch of crapola about Salander and Blomkvist.
I have to confess that there is a significant amount of pointless prose in this novel just as there was in the previous volume. It's hard to imagine how Larsson even considered putting some of this stuff in there. More to the point, Salander is seriously out of the action in this one, so there is no relief offered by her activities; instead, Larsson has drafted in some utterly tedious nonsense. There's a long discussion on the price of toilets, for example (I am not kidding). Larsson seems obsessed with describing every street in Stockholm in minute detail in terms of how to get from one to the other. He also describes meals in appetite-suppressing detail, and rambles endlessly in rabid pursuit of totally irrelevant digressions.
For example, there's an entire sub-plot about one of the most idiotic women in literature: Blomkvist's married girlfriend, Erica. There's an inane tryst between Blomkvist and a security police officer (who happens to be a rather amazonian female). Blomkvist's indulgence of himself (in all three novels) in irresponsible, "care-free" sex is just downright stupid, and in no case does it contribute anything to the plot. But not one character ever raises the issue of venereal diseases or of the wisdom of jumping into bed with a slut like Blomkvist in this day and age. I really started disliking Blomkvist at the end of volume one, where he callously tears up Salander's heart with his profligate bullshit fling with Berger (I actually strongly dislike the pair of them) was what really turned me off Blomkvist, and he never did climb back into my good graces.
Any new writer who wrote like Larsson did would be (and in this case rightfully) ripped a new one by their editor (if the editor was worth anything), but as we have seen, good editors are few and far between, and evidently Larsson turned in the manuscripts for all three novels right before he died; it was almost like his heart was waiting until he had finished before it decided to stop beating, so no doubt he was given a bye for this trilogy. How wonderful would it be if all of us were given the same free pass? Well, maybe not, judged by some of the crap that's out there! It really goes to show what outrages you can get away with once you have your foot inside someone's publishing door, doesn't it though?
I should also say a word about the bizarre arrangement of the "chapters" or tracks on the audiobook disks, of which there are sixteen. The division into these chapters is completely random, with the breaks coming sometimes in the middle of a sentence! The "chapters are also very long (seven to nine minutes) when compared with those in Kushiel's Dart, which had many more disks, but had "chapter" times at about three minutes each. Just an observation.
So why am I going to rate this novel as worthy? Well, the other two were entertaining, and although this one was really annoying at times, it wraps them up perfectly well. The courtroom scene towards the end, where Blomkvist's sister represents Salander and does it masterfully, makes the rest of it worthwhile. There's a really dragged-out ending which should have been excluded or at least trimmed but that's okay. This whole trilogy is worth a read and Lisbeth Salander is one of the best characters ever to appear in any novel I've ever read.
