The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
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.

The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson

Title: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Author: Stieg Larsson
Publisher: Books On Tape
Rating: WORTHY!

For a review of the Swedish movie based on this novel, Flickan som lekte med elden, see here

Review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Review of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

TGWPWF begins with Lisbeth on an extended vacation in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean, Blomkvist at home wondering what the heck happened to her, since she left without a word and refuses to have anything to do with him, and Bjurman, technically her legal guardian, plotting her demise! Staying in Grenada, Lisbeth seduces a teen-aged boy who lives in a shack on the beach, and in between sessions of reading a massive tome on the history of mathematics, which is fascinating to her, ponders what to do, if anything, about an abusive doctor who is staying in her hotel, accompanied by his abused wife. Meanwhile there's a hurricane on the way. How great a start to a novel is that?!

This epic premise is a bit let-down by the execution, unfortunately! The hurricane (if that's what it was) comes and goes. Lisbeth rescues another woman from abuse in the middle of it: the doctor's wife. The doctor is found dead, blown 600 yards down the beach. We follow her back to Stockholm where she goes shopping for an apartment and furniture. This is the most mind-numbingly tedious episode in the entire trilogy so far. It was like reading Charlaine Harris - that's how god-awfully bad it was. I have no idea what Larsson was thinking of when he wrote this section. And actually, I don't really think I want to know!

In counterpoint, we do see Bjurman get really steamed (in a bad way!) about Lisbeth and he starts plotting how he can murder her. He begins by digging into her affairs because he can, being her guardian, and he starts to get a faint whiff of the fire she started - on her dad who was abusing her mother! We also learn that Lisbeth has a twin sister. Two Salanders are quite obviously better than one. Evidently they were separated from their mother when she proved incompetent to take care of them, but they were also separated from each other. This kinda made up for the Ikea shopping list!

We also learn of the affair between Harriet Vanger and Mikael Blomkvist (as does Erica!), but this goes nowhere, and Vanger disappears from the novel at that point, never to reappear. Lisbeth rekindles her relationship with lesbian lover Mimmi, and offers Mimmi her empty apartment to move into, since she has now moved herself considerably upscale. This happens right after Bjurman, in complete ignorance of Lisbeth's newly-won billionaire status and consequent change of address, has indirectly hired a huge blond German who is built like a brick outhouse and can feel no pain (Larsson evidently ripped this off from The World Is Not Enough. The German is supposed to kidnap Lisbeth from the very address Mimmi just moved into! Lisbeth's sixth sense is onto Bjurman even though she doesn't know exactly what he's doing. Oh, and Mimmi studies martial arts, so while this promised to be explosive, it actually wasn't quite written that way, but this definitely helps to clear out the dead wood from the wooden tour of the Ikea store with which Larsson earlier bored (or should it be board?!) us....

The novel picks up pace even more when the person tasked by Nils Bjurman to deal with Lisbeth Salander kills Bjurman and two friends of Mikael's who are working on exposing the Swedish sex-trade. Why Larsson didn't start his novel here is a really interesting question, because this is where the intrigue and the real story begins. Larsson leads us on an intricate and engrossing tour through the life of Lisbeth Salander. It's as disturbing as it is endearing, and as angering as it is heartening. If you started reading this novel at Chapter 7 you really wouldn't miss anything of significance or relevance. If a new author had written this - without having had the success of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Män som hatar kvinnor) under their belt, an editor would doubtlessly have told the author to seriously edit this novel. It just goes to show how indulged a successful author is, whereas a new author is abused cruelly on this score. All hail self-publishing!

Salander is now hosed with three murders (her prints are on the murder weapon), and a nationwide police hunt for her begins. But the findings make no sense at all to the police. No matter how they try to piece this jigsaw together, there are problems: the pieces seem to fit, but when you come right down to it, something is noticeably off. The pieces don't fit properly. Something is missing.

Meanwhile Lisbeth has dropped from sight, and she begins her own investigation, as does Blomkvist, as does Armansky! All the time, the puzzle pieces fall into place, one-by-one, but not always where you expect them to appear, and the picture which is emerging is one of unexpected weirdness. In the end, Lisbeth is shot in the head and buried. And that's all you're going to get from me! Ain't I evil?

It's hard to believe that I've read - or at least started on - ten novels since I first started listening to this on audio disk, but finally I finished it in paperback form this morning, and once again we have a worthy read. Yes, it got really boring during that one spell, but it picked up wonderfully after that, especially in the last hundred or so pages. Highly recommended (just skip over the Ikea obsession portion!).

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

Rating: WORTHY!

This story starts in December 2002, in Sverige, known to us English speakers as Sweden. The original Swedish version of this novel was titled Män som hatar kvinnor which means "Men who hate women". The second novel in this trilogy is the only one to retain its original Swedish title, and that title has appeared in two forms in English due to the fact that people have no idea where to place apostrophes! Thus we've had both "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" (for dumb North Americans) and "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest" (for all actual English speakers)(reference wikipedia), each title meaning something slightly different. The third novel was titled Air Castle Blowing Up in Swedish, and the three together form the Millennium trilogy. Sadly, all of these were published after Larsson died in 2004, so he saw none of the success these novels have enjoyed.

In the novel, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, known humorously as Kalle (a name which annoys him - it would be like an American investigative journalist being called Nancy, after Nancy Drew), is judged guilty of libel, and fined as well as sentenced to three months in prison. The suit was brought by a very rich businessman called Hans-Erik Wennerström, about whom Mikael had written an exposé in his magazine, Millennium, which he co-publishes with his some time love interest Erica, who happens to be married.

Mikael is in process of contemplating and adjusting to what this significant set-back means to his life when he's contacted indirectly by Henrik Vanger, a retired CEO of the huge of Vanger Corporation. Vanger decided to hire Blomkvist based on a background check undertaken by Lisbeth Salander, a skilled hacker and investigator who has done research for him before. Salander excels at what she does, but comes with a host of baggage. She looks more like someone who would be found at a punk music concert than she does a top researcher for a detective agency; however, as we follow this story, we discover that Lisbeth is really no more screwed-up than any other character in the story when you get right down to it, and probably doing better than most, but her problems are far from over.

As Mikael travels north to visit Vanger and find out what this job offer entails, Lisbeth is tasked with investigating the case which Mikael just lost. The reason for this is that Lisbeth had remarked that she thought that there was something fishy going on there, and if she said so, there probably was. Lisbeth Salander is one of my all-time favorites up there with other great female protagonists which I've remarked upon in various places in my blog. More on this later.

Mikael ends up taking Vanger up on his job offer. His cover story is that he's writing a Vanger family history. His real job is to investigate the disappearance - the unexplained disappearance almost forty years previously - of Harriet Vanger, Henrik Vanger's brother Gottfried's daughter. No one has even come close to solving what is, in many regards, a "locked room mystery". Harriet was in the nearby town at the annual children's parade, then she came back to the island and sought to speak with her uncle, but he was busy. She disappeared, quite literally, after that, and no trace had ever been found of her.

Mikael takes up residence in a cottage across the street from Henrik Vanger's home and begins meeting with him regularly. Henrik delivers several boxes of evidence connected with Harriet's disappearance, which Mikael starts looking through. He also starts an affair with Celia Vanger, a middle-aged school principal who lives next door to Henrik. He can find nothing of interest regarding Harriet's disappearance but he makes real progress on actually writing the Vanger family history.

While he's having sweet sex on the Island, Lisbeth is raped on the mainland. Here's where there is a difference from the movie. In the movie, Lisbeth is attacked in the subway and fights off her attackers, but her laptop is broken in the process. In the novel, there is no attack in the subway. Her laptop is broken when she's securing her bike in a garage, and a car reverses over her backpack which she had temporarily laid on the ground.

I think the reason they changed it in the movie was to summarize Lisbeth's life history, which was one of intransigence on her part and abuse from others, of one form or another. But one characteristic was that she never backed down from a fight, not even from someone who would bloody her up pretty badly if she tangled with them. She was abused not only by other people, but by authority too, and part of the reason for this was that she would never cooperate with authority even when it would have actually served her best interests. She realizes this too late to change her early years, but not too late to change her future, and she refuses to see herself as a victim.

Since her old guardian died of a heart attack, and her new guardian, Bjurman, is a sadist and a control freak, she lost control of her own money, and was required to go to him to ask for the money to buy a new computer. She wants the best there is and cannot finance it from the money she has squirreled away at home. Bjurman begins fondling Lisbeth, convinced she has no power to stop him - and makes her fellate him. On her next visit, he makes her come to his home, where he handcuffs her to the bed and rapes her anally. What he did not realize was that she was recording this visit on a security camera she borrowed from her job at the Milton security agency where she works!

So the next time she sees Bjurman after that, she tases him and tattoos on his chest that he's a sadist and a rapist, applying some of his own sex toys to him in the same way he applied his self to her. Lisbeth then explains to him in detail how it's going to be: that she will never see him again unless she needs to for whatever reason. He will nonetheless file monthly reports saying she's doing great. He will turn over her finances to her own control immediately, and a year from now he will recommend that she should be given her life back, free from any guardianship. Either that or the DVD she made will go to the press and the police. She also takes his keys, informing him that she will visit him now and then, when she's sleeping, and if she ever finds a trace of another women in his home, she will publicize the DVD. Now she has control. We hear no more of Bjurman in this entire novel.

When Mikael returns from his jail sentence, it's well into spring. He gets out a month early and has an amusing visit from Erica while he's in bed with Celia, which causes Celia to quit their relationship. On the Harriet front, Mikael discovers something no one else has seen. He has dug up archive photos from the local newspaper, and in a series of these, showing the children's parade, he notices that while everyone else is looking at the parade, Harriet turns sharply and looks at something across the street, something which appears to shock or scare her. It was immediately after that, whatever it was, that she went to talk to her uncle, failed in that endeavor, and subsequently disappeared. Mikael also notices that there was a couple behind Harriet who were taking a picture at the precise time her facial expression changed. If he can only track down that couple, and if only they have that picture, he will be able to see what Harriet saw.

No doubt you know by now, but he does indeed track down the couple - one of them at least - and recovers the photograph. But he doesn't know who is in it. He returns to Hedeby Island to check on Henrik and gets chewed out by one of the family with whom he has had almost no contact, but worse than this, he gets chewed out by Celia Vanger as well, which quite startles him.

One of the most amusing parts of this novel is when Mikael discovers that his computer has been hacked, and he then learns via Henrik's lawyer that it was likely Lisbeth who did it. Lisbeth is quite flummoxed to discover Mikael outside her door one morning. This is the start of their working relationship - or should I call it a working relationship with benefits? Mikael tasks Lisbeth with finding out whether that list of names in Harriet's Bible is a list of murder victims. It is, and Lisbeth tracks down who they were along with an additional set of names which should have been on the list. The unanswered question is what does that have to do with Harriet?

I'm not going to go all the way into the solution to this mystery here. But the rest of the reading is awesome, and rest assured that not only is the main mystery solved, another is resolved along with it. Stieg Larsson knows how to write, and Lisbeth Salander is one of the most engaging and intriguing characters ever written, and I put her up there with the early Honor Harrington (not the late, boring, Honor Harrington), with Katsa, with Kitai, and with Molly Millions. I fully recommend this novel and shall now be happily moving along to the audio book version of volume two in this trilogy.

I have to warn you that the ending to this novel is very different from what was shown in the movie (that is, in Män som hatar kvinnor - I have yet to see the remade US version). I'm not sure why they chose to end the movie as they did, but the novel ends on a rather depressing and sad note. However, I fully recommend the novel, because (as I've indicated!) it is excellent, and the ending in particular is a much better read than the movie is a view. Now that I've completed this one, I'm very much looking forward to volumes two and three, which I have never read.