The Girl Who Played With Fire — Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press)

If like millions of others you’ve enjoyed The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, then you’re sure to read the sequel. And when you do, The Girl Who Played With Fire will not disappoint.

The two main characters – crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist and kick-ass witch-with-online-wand Lisbeth Salander – are no less busy, and the ne’er do wells no less nasty. ‘All the evil’ that is hinted-at-but-never-revealed in Dragon Tattoo is unravelled and addressed. Depths are plumbed and tensions developed, building to a climax that compels you to rush out and buy the third and final instalment of the Millennium Trilogy. It isn’t hard to see why so many people are reading these books.

All the obvious qualities that distinguish Larsson as a first-rate popular story-teller are here. The plot-driven pace of his prose, loaded with contemporary references, but leavened with playful asides – lardy bikers, Lesbian Satanists, Mr Jerker – delivers more kicks for your Krona than Kurt Wallander will ever muster. Baby-boomers are teased and pleased with glossy object recognition and hot property-porn. After a hard day at Ikea, splashing-out on furniture with daft names we get to share the joy of the owner’s new Jacuzzi – she ‘put her hands on her breasts and pinched her nipples hard’ with the sheer joy of it all. If Location, Location went in for more of that, sub-prime would surely be no more.

It isn’t all day-time TV, though. There’s compassion, including wonderfully tender encounters between Salander and her old guardian Palmgren, debilitated by a stroke, but revitalised by her love and her chess skills. There are genuinely gripping scenes, including one of boxing that’s as taught as Norman Mailer. And ultimately there is closure, and we warm to the skinny kid Salander for being so much more than a digital necromancer.

Aside from these more obviously appealing factors, I want to suggest something else about Firethat accounts for its overall success. That is, a symbolic order quite different from Dragon Tattoo, structuring characters and events in more conventional late-modern terms. And it is a measure of Larsson’s own progress that this shifting of the symbolic furniture makes for an altogether tighter drama.

Only a few pages into Fire it is clearly signalled that the main character has changed. InDragon Tattoo Salander’s child-like physique reflects her under-development as a character. But now, in Fire, ‘all of sudden’ she has ‘two solid, round breasts of medium size’. The Wasp tattoo on her neck has gone and she soon loses a good deal of the ironmongery in her face, tongue and elsewhere. She acknowledges how she had fallen in love with Blomkvist, but is now resolved to be mistress of her own desire. That this should include a boy called ‘Bland’ is incidental, a reminder of how far she still has to travel. And if ‘solid’, ‘round’ and ‘medium’ are less than convincing markers of maturity, still we get the point, of a claim for a more grown-up, filled-out status on the part of this most composite of characters.

Salander’s personal transformation reflects an enhanced presence overall. In Dragon Tattoo it was Blomkvist’s project that bound them together, rummaging through the baggage of the Vangar clan, and it was his face that filled the public screen. But in Fire it is Salander’s own back-story that binds the plot, and it is her face that fills the public’s TV screens. From an ethereal vulnerability in Dragon Tattoo, Salander is promoted to a robust agent of her own self-interest in Fire. She doesn’t have much choice. Her fingerprints link her to three murders. She becomes Public Enemy No. 1. But we readers know better.

If you’ve not read the book, you might want to stop here, as I presume some familiarity in what follows. To understand the heat of Fire we’ll need to take a look at its fuel.

At the heart of Fire, I want to argue, is a critique that identifies legitimate institutions as the enemy of the peace. Demented giants and assorted hobgoblins are still in evidence, but it is ultimately the respectable men-in-big-hats who are responsible for the greatest wickedness, overseeing whole empires of reason in the putative interests of the mass of ordinary men and women. Lurking within this symbolic order is a deep unease with the normal, everyday functions of democracy itself.

This is evident in the latter half of the book where we discover that Salander’s dad – Zalachenko – is a relic of Cold War realpolitik with a privileged legal status granted by the state. That Zalachenko is a Grade A monster is just a dramatic hook. His true function is to remind us of the monstrosities of state power – the trickle-down of evil that happens when we’re looking the other way. The task of the crusading liberal journalist is to alert the rest of us to ‘all the evil’, in the hope that common-sense might prevail. As Blomkvist himself reflects, the challenge is to tell the story ‘in such a way that nobody could fail to understand that there was something wrong with the system itself’, the kind of story-telling that is ‘on the endangered species list.’

If ‘nobody’ is going to fail to understand the problem, then everybody must be made aware there is ‘something wrong with the system itself.’ This is clearly a tall order, but one crusading liberals are wont to shoulder in the hope everybody else might be persuaded to see things their way. But – as laudable as this aspiration can be – the very isolation and despair that so often sparks the insight, can easily morph into irritation with those who don’t get the message. And then the problem becomes those who do ‘fail to understand that there was something wrong with the system itself.’ At which point the ordinary, everyday legitimation of ‘the system’ – the benign, legal apparatus of civil society – begins to look more and more like the root of ‘all the evil.’

Such themes are developed in two ways in Fire. Firstly – and least successfully – ‘one of the most deeply buried secrets’ of the Swedish state is Salander’s father Zalachenko, the beast behind ‘all the evil.’ Just as Salander is understood to be ‘dubious in the eyes of the law, but not a crime against God’s laws’, then so is her father the very antithesis of this moral order, a state sanctioned affront to all that is good and true. But Zalachenko is also history, a Cold War dinosaur and a sadist who officially ‘did not exist.’ As such his place in the symbolic order is all too obvious, as the monster that must be slain if order is to be resumed. His sins aren’t tattooed across his torso, but they are screamingly obvious to anyone who so much as hears his name mentioned: He’s behind you, we shout from the stalls. As systemic wrong’s go, Zalachenko is a pristine but ultimately isolated outlier from an earlier era.

The same cannot be said of the Psychiatrist, Dr Peter Teleborian, ‘shielded behind a curtain of documents, assessments, academic honours and psychiatric mumbo-jumbo. Not a single one of his actions could ever be reported or criticized.’ When Holger Palmgren says to Blomkvist – of Teleborian – ‘I believed him, and why not?’ we know this is less to do with ‘God’s laws’ and everything to do with the formal juridical order. Teleborian ‘had a state endorsed mandate’. Zalachenko had something similar. But Teleborian is a proper head-doctor offering therapy to the abnormal, rather than a monstrous outlier from normality. Teleborian is ‘the most loathsome and disgusting sadist Salander had ever met’, not because of any resemblance to that other famous fictional Psychiatrist, Dr Hannibal Lecter, but precisely because of his conventional, run-of-the-mill, state-mandated acceptability.

This thesis – of the proximity of evil – is significant. At one level it reminds us of the Golden Era of detective fiction, – the raison d’etre of which was reassurance, of ‘a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored.’ Such reassurances are still around, but in general have given way to a more skeptical view, with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) setting an early benchmark, of hoods and pimps and dangerous dames up front, making a lot of noise, but an entirely respectable business-man in-back, overseeing and profiting from the whole rotten show. Real crime is structural, said Hammett, constituted in law and property. Raymond Chandler ploughed a similar furrow: ‘Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system.’ Instead of affirming ‘the system’ many of the best writers took to critiquing it, with the detective a ‘kind of poor man’s sociologist.’

Evolving out of this critical view though is a radical refrain of more recent origin. For sure, as Lehman Brothers and the rest attest, the structural dimension is still there. Indeed, in many ways, we’ve never been more aware of the madness of modern markets and the precariousness of our place in that global order. But this awareness is itself now informed by a heightened sense of vulnerability, an elementary uncertainty about our role amidst it all. The structures are still there, but they are increasingly distant and often virtual, and here, in Fire, somewhat silly in the form of an ageing left-over from the bad old days of the Cold War.

Much more interesting are Teleborian’s credentials, as state-mandated arbiter of another’s freedom. Instead of a corporate giant working the levers of power from within a fortified castle, like the great Oz himself, it is a man in a white coat servicing ‘the system’ in the name of normality. Structure here means something more than top-down authority, more or less veiled. Here it pertains to the plastic, intangible, inter-subjective dimension of everyday life, where normality is realised and enacted as culture.

This is a radical refrain that has been around for a long time, but which in the 1960’s crystallised as ‘anti-psychiatry,’ a key theme of the ‘culture wars’ of the USA. In fiction the authoritarian side of psychiatry – ‘policing the norm’ – was captured in various ways, in Catch-22 (1961), A Clockwork Orange (1962), One flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), and MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors (1968). As novels and then as movies the underlying point was much the same: Psychiatry wasn’t value-free. It serviced a barbarous, inhuman, war-mongering normality, the ‘Moloch whose name is the Mind’, as Allen Ginsberg put it. It was a locus of legitimacy in what was thought to be an illegitimate, immoral culture. The ‘counter culture’ was its ethical obverse.

Before long the ‘counter’ became mainstream. Truths once bounded and weighted by institutional authority are now un-moored and relative, up-for-grabs by moral entrepreneurs dressed as victims, the celebrities of our time. In which context, the Psychiatrist occupies a difficult and ambiguous role, adjudicating abnormality in a world that knows-not the meaning of the norm. Caught between competing claims, the Psychiatrist is needed to vouchsafe the claim, but resented for having the authority to do so. Which begins to account for the symbolism of Dr Peter Teleborian, as a monster in whom Holger Palmgren – the most endearing and rounded character in the whole book – once believed.

Glossy and trivial it may often be. But there is an arc of meaning tighter and more contemporary than its predecessor. In Dragon Tattoo Salander remained in the shadows. We were interested, but never inhabited her character. Her status as victim was stretched but never transcended. At the close she was wounded, emotionally.

In Fire she comes into the foreground, and asserts her agency through an engagement with her own and Sweden’s past. Her peculiar state of unfreedom is metaphor for a wider political problem, as excavated and re-presented by the crusading journalist whose challenge it is to get everyone ‘to understand that there was something wrong with the system.’ Salander takes us into the furthest reaches of that system/cave, in order to slay the monster. But what do we find there? Her own father, whose barbarism is endorsed and excused by an upright member of the medical profession.

At the close of Fire she is also wounded, this time physically. Indeed, Larsson seems all too keen to have her punctured and penetrated in ways that would be almost unthinkable for Blomkvist, whose development is far less tortured. But that’s another discussion, and in any case there’s another book to go. Maybe Salander will transcend her fantastic identity and inch a little bit closer to reality? Maybe not. However that pan’s out, we know enough now to understand that ‘all the evil’ is a lot closer to home than Dragon Tattoo suggested. And it is this proximity, I think, that is so very much in tune with the zeitgeist, identifying the most legitimate institutions as the source of the greatest injustice.

At its worst – on the wilder shores of po-mo theory, for example – this sort of perspective disables all judgement. If we are all instruments of a historically destructive rationality, then the very notion of an individual making the right choice, let alone acting upon it, is rendered pitiably naive. But this isn’t a misery memoir or its sociological equivalent. This is crime fiction, the most Protestant of genres, where – classically – the reader is invited to imagine that ‘if he too had used the light of cool inductive reasoning and the logic of stern remorseless facts then he too would have fixed the guilt.’ Here, in Fire, guilt is fixed, and a kind of justice dispensed, in the form of an axe wedged in Zalachenko’s knee. But Teleborian – ‘the most loathsome and disgusting sadist Salander had ever met’ – remains un-fixed, a symbol of legitimate authority less easily challenged by the kind of isolated individuals dominating Larsson’s drama. We sympathise with Salander and relish her revenge, but are also cognisant of the limits of her powers. And if ‘all the evil’ is ultimately down to Daddy – biological and metaphorical – then no amount of cool inductive reasoning will fix the guilt.

Stephen Bowler and Angelica Michelis will discuss the popularity of Stieg Larsson’s trilogy.