ZapTown

There’s an old saying. I can’t quite remember how it’s phrased, but the gist of it is that as soon as you find some kind of certainty to cling to, the world will find a way to show you that there are still cracks in your armor. So it was with my reading habits–I made a public mention, a couple of weeks ago in this space, of how long it had taken me to finish Stephen King’s mammoth novel UNDER THE DOME, and how I was concerned about slowing down as a reader as I aged. So what happened since then? Well, I went out and picked up a copy of Steig Larsson’s THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, a book that is, I think fair to say, not particularly slender in its own right (DRAGON TATTOO isn’t quite as thick as UNDER THE DOME, clocking in around a mere 825 pages in paperback!) and dove in, getting through the entire book in about a week and a half. Granted, it’s about two hundred pages shorter than King, but still, after bemoaning my ability to read more than a few pages a day in the recent past, this is a suggestion that a book can still ‘click’ for my reader brain and force me to turn the pages.

I liked Larsson’s book quite a bit, as the novel manages to be two things simultaneously–it’s an unabashed page-turner mystery, a cold case locked-room (or in this case, locked-island) murder where the two protagonists aren’t detectives, but computer wielding information-gatherers drawn in by circumstance. The reader spends the bulk of the book’s plot getting to know these two erstwhile investigators as much as they do the people that are being investigated, and the characters feel three-dimensional, vividly drawn, but with minimal unnecessary detail. However, the book also served as an interesting slice of 21st century mainline culture for me–touching on issues such as psychology of relationships, the financial crisis, and media ownership in a way that seemed relevant without being shoehorned in. This is a novel that throws a lot of information at the reader, but never really needs to slow down to allow it to be digested. Long stretches of the book consist primarily of communication, either dialogue or email, and description is (in English at least) kept to a minimum of utility–when details come, they often stand out as vividly as protagonist lisbeth Salander’s tattoos.

At the same time, this is a book that certain readers probably will be somewhat uncomfortable with. The murder-mystery plot that drives the story deals with several issues,  from white-power movements and eugenics to sexual sadism and assaults against women (The original title for Larsson’s book was, I have read, MEN WHO HATE WOMEN–if that rumor isn’t true, then, as the bard says, it oughtta be).  This leads to some upsetting scenes and descriptions (kept largely offstage, but still described in frank, spare prose—the most cringeworthy was, for me, one murder scene involving a parakeet). Your mileage may vary–for me, it didn’t feel exploitative, but I’d be slightly concerned if I happened to be sitting on the bus and caught a ten-year-old reading it.

The discomfort is intentional, though-through the reactions of his protagonists, and the long chain of events being investigated, it’s clear that Larsson is indignant about the damage one human being can do to another without being punished for it. In this respect, there’s something  cathartic about the way that Salander and Blomkvist, the investigators at the heart of the case, handle the secrets they unearth. This is a book that works perfectly well on its own terms, but the closing chapters do leave one curious as to where Larsson’s characters are going to go from here. Good thing there’s a film version coming out in North America, along with the two published sequels.