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.
