For a change, this post has nothing to do with music, as Swedish crime author Stieg Larsson doesn’t go in for the rock ’n’ roll name-dropping that so endears me to his Scottish colleague Ian Rankin. I’ve just finished reading Larsson’s book “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”, the first part of his “Millennium Trilogy” and I found myself strangely moved by the book – despite my reservations both about the time Larsson takes to tell his story and the plethora of characters that inhabit it.
What got me about the novel besides the author’s strong stance against violence towards women (the Swedish title in fact means “Men Who Hate Women”) and his intricate depiction of a dysfunctional family of industrialists was the way that Larsson, himself a journalist, handles the media side of the story. “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” might turn out to be one of the last major crime novels written before the background of an intact newspaper industry, as many daily publications have either ceased to exist entirely or have retreated from the news-stand since the book came out in 2005.
What also moved me about the book was the camaraderie among the characters who work on the “Millennium” magazine that gives Larsson’s trilogy its name: as a freelance writer, I sorely miss the regular and friendly repartee with other colleagues in the field. But Larsson is in no way painting a rose-coloured picture of the press milieu. He also warns how easily journalists can be corrupted when personal matters infringe upon their work, and also demonstrates how people who might be crucial to a particular project often find themselves high and dry when a piece has been written up and published. Lisbeth Salander, the character who gives the novel its English title certainly discovers that to be true - at least at the end of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo”. There are, after all, two other books in the trilogy that I have yet to read. By the way, I lied about this post not having anything to do with music: Mikael Blomkvist, the central figure in “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” is a big Elvis fan.
