This is David
Lagercrantz's second novel continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium
trilogy, and I like it better than its predecessor The Girl In
The Spider's Web. Titling is not always a strong point in the
series, however, and title of the present volume is every bit as
clunky as The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest.
I thought Spider's
Web was interesting primarily in the way it seemed to try to
transform Lisbeth Salander's much commented-on status as an
anti-heroine into something more like an action hero. In that sense,
it was closest in feel to The Girl Who Played With Fire, the
second of Larsson's books, which had her as the almost lone
protagonist, seeking her revenge on her father. That worked because
it made such a change from the almost classical whodunnit structure
of Dragon Tattoo, just as the
third novel, Hornet's Nest, restored
Mikael Blomkvist
to the lead, while Salander lay in hospital, until the courtroom
drama which is the climax.
Lagercrantz
seems to have gone back consciously to the formula of the first
volume, in which Blomqvist is an investigative journalist, and the
third, because for much of this one Salander is in prison, getting her chance to kick ass in that environment, with both fellow prisoners and with the warden. It's a weakness of male authority figures. It's also an
awkward kind of mix, but just like the template of Dragon Tattoo, the story is linked to
the past of a very wealthy family and to a disappearing child. These
tropes come on top of the continuing ones about siblings—Salander's
sister who's now her arch-enemy/rival, and about secret government
programmes designed, it would seem, specifically to ensure Salander
gets abused in the interests of national security. In this case the programme is one about twins, which means the main
story and Salander's again overlap.
We
know that Larsson intended the Millennium series to extend to ten
volumes, like Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo's Beck, and we can almost
see Lagercrantz plotting out the links, overlaps and connections
which can see Blomkvist and Salander drawn in. And we know Larsson,
like many other Swedish writers, was concerned with government abuse
of police powers, and the creation of an over-watching secret state,
so we can also see how the sketching out of that template can keep
the story moving. The problem is that all of this, to five volumes,
occurs predominantly as either backstory or the working out of
backstory, and backstory on a grand scale as well as one involving
Salander.
Lagercrantz
can write better than Larsson, but he sometimes doesn't seem to have
the knack for narrative drive—these can be separate things, as
anyone who follows along voraciously say, a John Grisham story, even when the
writing often jars, can attest. Lagercrantz has the habit of
re-introducing characters, even main characters,
constantly—explaining who they are and what they do, as if he were
influenced by English critics whose main response to Scandinavian crime is to
marvel at how difficult the names are to pronounce. It's like getting
constant footnotes instead of the usual dramatis personae in the
front pages of a Russian novel.
But
in the end, he gets the story to pay off, and
it has a marvelous coda which is pure Salander, though a side of her
we've never seen on the page before; it alone was worth the path
through the novel, though that was never a problem in the first
place.
The
Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye
by
David Lagercrantz
Maclehose
Press, 2017 £20.00 ISBN 9780857056405
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