Thursday, July 15, 2010
Review 2 - By Melinda Miller - www.buffalonews.com
As his Millennium trilogy has marched across the international best-seller lists, Stieg Larsson’s books have taken the idea that there is a rot that lives in men’s souls, and peeled away the deception. He uses bang-up crime stories to plaster the consequences of moral relativism all over society in broad and detailed fashion.
And at last, Americans (those who haven’t already jumped the gun via amazon.uk) can see how it all works out. The third book — another tremendous read — was officially released here last week.
(If you haven’t finished the first two, stop reading this now. There is no reason to start reading Larsson with this book; the three are intended to be read in order, just like Tolkien or the Harry Potter books.)
“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” picks up exactly where the second book’s cliffhanger ending left off, with a gravely wounded Lisbeth Salander being rushed to a hospital after a near-fatal encounter with her father, a Russian gangster whom she whacked in the face with an ax after he had her shot and buried alive.
In Larsson’s first two books, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” he introduced his alter- ego, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and Lisbeth Salander, a Goth computer hacker whose anti-social aggressiveness is of the kind that mystery authors usually relegate to slightly scary but handy sidekick status (for example, Myron Bolitar’s outside-the-law buddy Win in Harlan Coban’s novels; Spenser’s super-cool ally Hawk in Robert Parker’s, etc.)
In her multititle role, Salander is no sidekick, but she is also no static centerpiece. Larsson is one writer who lets his characters grow and change.
After “Tattoo’s” introductory island-crime mystery, and “Fire’s” much more personal murder intrigue (Salander was accused of killing three people), Larsson kicks it up a few hundred notches in “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” and goes after wrongdoing on a much larger scale.
The number of characters — in law enforcement, in a secret government organization, in the media and business — explodes like a kicked beehive as Larsson uses the heft of his book to attack in dozens of directions at once. A feminist himself, he continues to go after those who see women as easy, legitimate targets, but he doesn’t limit himself to that.
The dynamics of Salander’s early life, her nasty father’s life (he’s in a hospital room down the hall from her) and post-war, Cold War Swedish government intrigue make for an intricate tangle of plots and positions. Blomkvist finds that his efforts to help Salander, who still faces criminal charges, have more and more to do with his journalistic interests — exposing government corruption.
Salander, confined for most of the book to a hospital room or prison cell, is slowly letting a few people through the mile-high concertina wire she keeps around herself, daring to trust them, a little. If anything, it makes her more interesting.
Her immobility is a sharp contrast to the flood of action outside her view, because this time, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are dealing with a whole different level of, you could say, evil.
Larsson shows a well-developed instinct for how people can appear to be perfectly good while being very bad; and how those who have good intentions can slide all too easily into rationalizing their own immoral behavior.
And that is the line for Larsson. Not good/bad, right or wrong, or, particularly, legal or illegal. His trilogy is an extended morality play, with the sanctioned abuse of young Lisbeth and her furied revenge at its center.
As most of his readers already know, Larsson died of a heart attack at age 50, shortly after turning in the manuscripts for the first three books. He reportedly had planned to write 10 Salander mysteries, working on several at once (with at least one supposedly almost finished in his laptop).
With “Hornet’s Nest,” he begins building a wider, more populated world, including an entire sidebar mystery involving Blomkvist’s editor/lover Erica Berger, mention of Salander’s twin sister, and other more political machinations. You can see that he was heading somewhere big.
Where that may have been will be his most infuriating unsolved mystery.
But not here, not in this book. “Hornet’s Nest” is no cliff hanger. In chasing down his personal demons of right-wing conspiracies and socially sanctioned inhumanity, Larsson delivers the goods, with Lisbeth and a nail gun in a slam bang climax and, if it has to be, a real, final ending.
And at last, Americans (those who haven’t already jumped the gun via amazon.uk) can see how it all works out. The third book — another tremendous read — was officially released here last week.
(If you haven’t finished the first two, stop reading this now. There is no reason to start reading Larsson with this book; the three are intended to be read in order, just like Tolkien or the Harry Potter books.)
“The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest” picks up exactly where the second book’s cliffhanger ending left off, with a gravely wounded Lisbeth Salander being rushed to a hospital after a near-fatal encounter with her father, a Russian gangster whom she whacked in the face with an ax after he had her shot and buried alive.
In Larsson’s first two books, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” he introduced his alter- ego, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and Lisbeth Salander, a Goth computer hacker whose anti-social aggressiveness is of the kind that mystery authors usually relegate to slightly scary but handy sidekick status (for example, Myron Bolitar’s outside-the-law buddy Win in Harlan Coban’s novels; Spenser’s super-cool ally Hawk in Robert Parker’s, etc.)
In her multititle role, Salander is no sidekick, but she is also no static centerpiece. Larsson is one writer who lets his characters grow and change.
After “Tattoo’s” introductory island-crime mystery, and “Fire’s” much more personal murder intrigue (Salander was accused of killing three people), Larsson kicks it up a few hundred notches in “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” and goes after wrongdoing on a much larger scale.
The number of characters — in law enforcement, in a secret government organization, in the media and business — explodes like a kicked beehive as Larsson uses the heft of his book to attack in dozens of directions at once. A feminist himself, he continues to go after those who see women as easy, legitimate targets, but he doesn’t limit himself to that.
The dynamics of Salander’s early life, her nasty father’s life (he’s in a hospital room down the hall from her) and post-war, Cold War Swedish government intrigue make for an intricate tangle of plots and positions. Blomkvist finds that his efforts to help Salander, who still faces criminal charges, have more and more to do with his journalistic interests — exposing government corruption.
Salander, confined for most of the book to a hospital room or prison cell, is slowly letting a few people through the mile-high concertina wire she keeps around herself, daring to trust them, a little. If anything, it makes her more interesting.
Her immobility is a sharp contrast to the flood of action outside her view, because this time, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander are dealing with a whole different level of, you could say, evil.
Larsson shows a well-developed instinct for how people can appear to be perfectly good while being very bad; and how those who have good intentions can slide all too easily into rationalizing their own immoral behavior.
And that is the line for Larsson. Not good/bad, right or wrong, or, particularly, legal or illegal. His trilogy is an extended morality play, with the sanctioned abuse of young Lisbeth and her furied revenge at its center.
As most of his readers already know, Larsson died of a heart attack at age 50, shortly after turning in the manuscripts for the first three books. He reportedly had planned to write 10 Salander mysteries, working on several at once (with at least one supposedly almost finished in his laptop).
With “Hornet’s Nest,” he begins building a wider, more populated world, including an entire sidebar mystery involving Blomkvist’s editor/lover Erica Berger, mention of Salander’s twin sister, and other more political machinations. You can see that he was heading somewhere big.
Where that may have been will be his most infuriating unsolved mystery.
But not here, not in this book. “Hornet’s Nest” is no cliff hanger. In chasing down his personal demons of right-wing conspiracies and socially sanctioned inhumanity, Larsson delivers the goods, with Lisbeth and a nail gun in a slam bang climax and, if it has to be, a real, final ending.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Review 1- Bernadette's review- www.goodreads.com
As the book opens Lisbeth Salander, subject of a nation-wide manhunt on suspicion of three murders, has been shot several times, once in the head, and is on her way by helicopter to hospital. Alexander Zalachenko, her father and a former Russian agent being protected by members of the Swedish police, has been hit in the face with an axe by Lisbeth and is on his way to the same hospital. Over the coming days both have their injuries treated while the bureaucrats and police officers who have protected Zalachenko for many years re-group to decide what action to take to ensure their activities are not uncovered. At the same time investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist and his colleagues at Millennium magazine start to piece together the evidence that will demonstrate what crimes have been committed and by whom.
First, let me get the flaws out of the way.
As was the case with the first two books in this series Hornets' Nest would have benefited from tighter editing: it isn't really a 600 page story. Sometimes excruciating details are provided about an eclectic collection of subjects (I have learned more than I ever wanted to about the hierarchy of the Swedish Police for example) and then other threads are left almost bare (as if Larsson had forgotten them in his rush to the end). Also, as he did in the first book, Larsson periodically stepped out of the role of storyteller and became a journalist preparing an in-depth Sunday feature with several diatribes and some passages that belonged in a lecture rather than a thriller. This failure to follow the 'show don't tell' rule is the most hated of my personal pet peeves and can be the thing that makes me stop reading. But I have learned that the details and the lecturing are as much a part of Larsson's work as Lisbeth and his other fabulous characters and I think, perhaps, they are the necessary flip side of the thing that makes him such a good yarn-spinner: his passion.
It's clearer than ever in this book that Larsson aimed to do more than tell a thrilling story. Earlier this year another journalist turned fiction writer, Matt Rees, blogged that writing his fictional tales set in Palestine allowed him to be far more truthful about the realities there than he could ever have been in his journalism and I wonder if Larsson didn't experience this same phenomenon. He demonstrates the myriad ways women are mistreated by men throughout the book and I suspect much of this is based on things he saw as a journalist. Although it is Lisbeth who, as an almost allegorical character, experiences the worst of treatments over many years by men who abuse their physical and political power there are many other stories intertwined here. For example Erika Berger is stalked by someone she barely knows and treated abysmally on top of it, women are trafficked and treated as though no more than goods by Zalachenko and his son and there's even a reminder of the trauma caused to Harriet Vanger which, in a way, started the entire series off. But Larsson doesn't just depict a black and white world where all the men are awful and all women victims. The book is brimming with positive female characters who can look after themselves as well as many men who go out of their way to right the wrongs they have seen done around them.
Lisbeth plays a less active role in this book than in any of the others which could have disappointed me but didn't. She features as a motivating force for much of the action and starts to display glimpses of a slowly healing psyche after all the abuse she has suffered. In addition there are many other compelling characters to become intrigued by. Erika features in a startling minor thread and is more well-rounded in this novel and there are great new characters to meet such as Mikael's sister Annika who becomes Lisbeth's lawyer. Mikael himself is probably his most engaging in this book and certainly his most mature as he develops sensitive professional and personal relationships with the police who must investigate the Zalachenko affair. Even the bad guys are well-drawn and reading about how they were drawn into the conspiracy to protect Zalachenko and in so doing cause deep harm to Lisbeth and others is quite fascinating.
Although all three novels have featured the Millennium magazine it was in this book that I was really struck by Larsson's at times old-fashioned depiction of the role investigative journalism and plays in our world. I suppose being a journalist himself he was biased but it really does hit home how much we need a functional fourth estate and what trouble us little folk might be in if they disappear as would seem likely given the dire predictions for mainstream media.
In the end The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest is a complex, unpredictable book that wears its liberal heart proudly on its sleeve. I don't imagine you could make much sense of it without having read the first two in the series and I would strongly recommend that if you're going to read them at all (and you really, really should) then you must, as with all the very best stories, start at the beginning.
First, let me get the flaws out of the way.
As was the case with the first two books in this series Hornets' Nest would have benefited from tighter editing: it isn't really a 600 page story. Sometimes excruciating details are provided about an eclectic collection of subjects (I have learned more than I ever wanted to about the hierarchy of the Swedish Police for example) and then other threads are left almost bare (as if Larsson had forgotten them in his rush to the end). Also, as he did in the first book, Larsson periodically stepped out of the role of storyteller and became a journalist preparing an in-depth Sunday feature with several diatribes and some passages that belonged in a lecture rather than a thriller. This failure to follow the 'show don't tell' rule is the most hated of my personal pet peeves and can be the thing that makes me stop reading. But I have learned that the details and the lecturing are as much a part of Larsson's work as Lisbeth and his other fabulous characters and I think, perhaps, they are the necessary flip side of the thing that makes him such a good yarn-spinner: his passion.
It's clearer than ever in this book that Larsson aimed to do more than tell a thrilling story. Earlier this year another journalist turned fiction writer, Matt Rees, blogged that writing his fictional tales set in Palestine allowed him to be far more truthful about the realities there than he could ever have been in his journalism and I wonder if Larsson didn't experience this same phenomenon. He demonstrates the myriad ways women are mistreated by men throughout the book and I suspect much of this is based on things he saw as a journalist. Although it is Lisbeth who, as an almost allegorical character, experiences the worst of treatments over many years by men who abuse their physical and political power there are many other stories intertwined here. For example Erika Berger is stalked by someone she barely knows and treated abysmally on top of it, women are trafficked and treated as though no more than goods by Zalachenko and his son and there's even a reminder of the trauma caused to Harriet Vanger which, in a way, started the entire series off. But Larsson doesn't just depict a black and white world where all the men are awful and all women victims. The book is brimming with positive female characters who can look after themselves as well as many men who go out of their way to right the wrongs they have seen done around them.
Lisbeth plays a less active role in this book than in any of the others which could have disappointed me but didn't. She features as a motivating force for much of the action and starts to display glimpses of a slowly healing psyche after all the abuse she has suffered. In addition there are many other compelling characters to become intrigued by. Erika features in a startling minor thread and is more well-rounded in this novel and there are great new characters to meet such as Mikael's sister Annika who becomes Lisbeth's lawyer. Mikael himself is probably his most engaging in this book and certainly his most mature as he develops sensitive professional and personal relationships with the police who must investigate the Zalachenko affair. Even the bad guys are well-drawn and reading about how they were drawn into the conspiracy to protect Zalachenko and in so doing cause deep harm to Lisbeth and others is quite fascinating.
Although all three novels have featured the Millennium magazine it was in this book that I was really struck by Larsson's at times old-fashioned depiction of the role investigative journalism and plays in our world. I suppose being a journalist himself he was biased but it really does hit home how much we need a functional fourth estate and what trouble us little folk might be in if they disappear as would seem likely given the dire predictions for mainstream media.
In the end The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest is a complex, unpredictable book that wears its liberal heart proudly on its sleeve. I don't imagine you could make much sense of it without having read the first two in the series and I would strongly recommend that if you're going to read them at all (and you really, really should) then you must, as with all the very best stories, start at the beginning.
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