The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
Mikael Blomkvist is in a bit of a spot. He's just lost a libel case after publishing what turned out to be unfounded allegations against a prominent Swedish businessman and financier, and consequently
Millennium, the magazine he runs (with his colleague and occasional lover Erika Berger) and in which the allegations were published, looks like it may be going down the tubes as well. Also, the loss of the libel case means he's going to have to spend three months in prison pretty imminently.
So when elderly industrialist Henrik Vanger comes to Blomkvist with a proposal, Blomkvist isn't really in a position to refuse. What Vanger wants is for Blomkvist to write a history of the Vanger dynasty. Well, actually, this is just a cover for what Vanger
really wants, which is for Blomkvist to investigate the unsolved disappearance of his niece Harriet way back in 1966. Reluctantly, since it will involve several months living up in northern Sweden some hours away from his home in Stockholm, Blomkvist agrees.
In parallel with all this we are introduced to Lisbeth Salander, straight out of the box marked "quirky anti-heroines". Tiny waif-like creature? Check. Tattoos (including the titular dragon)? Check. Bisexual? Check. Murky past of unspecified but vaguely alluded-to horror and abuse? Check. Salander is also a brilliant computer hacker who does freelance work for a firm of security consultants, in which capacity, it turns out, she was hired to do some digging up of information on Blomkvist for Vanger's lawyers before the job offer was made. Eventually Blomkvist and Salander meet, and she agrees to help out with the investigation.
Most of the Vanger dynasty still live on the (fictional) island of Hedeby, which functions as a sort of family compound. And a rum lot some of them are too, especially Harald, Henrik's older brother, with his links to Sweden's
murky flirtation with Nazism back in the 1930's, and icy and intimidating matriarch Isabella, wife of Henrik's late nephew Gottfried. The younger generation seem more accommodating - Gottfried's son Martin (brother of Harriet) is now the CEO of the Vanger corporation now that Henrik is in semi-retirement and seems keen to help, and when Blomkvist calls on Harald's daughter Cecilia and she answers the door clad only in a bathrobe it turns out she's happy to be very accommodating
indeed, if you know what I mean. You'll have worked out by now that Blomkvist is a bit of a playboy (and pretty clearly a thinly-disguised authorial
alter ego) with a typically Scandinavian lack of hang-ups about sex; just to prove the point he starts sleeping with Salander as well just for good measure after she comes to stay on the island with him.
Anyway, the investigation progresses, clues are found, false trails are followed, people turn out to be not all they seem to be, and gradually the solution to the mystery is revealed. I won't spoil it for you, but a gruesome tale of religious mania, misogyny, Nazism, serial killing and incest it is too, complete with the obligatory secret subterranean porn dungeon for the hero to be rescued from in the nick of time as he is about to be buggered to death or something similar.
Nothing I might say about
TGWTDT is going to affect its status as a publishing
megaphenomenon, at least part of which is down to the poignancy of
Larsson dropping dead only a short time after delivering the manuscripts for the first three novels in the series to his publisher (there are rumours that he planned to write up to ten books). The Swedish setting is interestingly quirky as well; it's a bit more exotic than
St. Mary Mead, anyway. One certainly might argue that the exotic Arctic setting added a veneer of artiness to films like
Insomnia and
Let The Right One In that made them seem more interesting than the police procedural/serial killer flick and mildly quirky vampire film they would otherwise respectively have been, and you could probably say the same for this book (and maybe for
Henning Mankell's highly-regarded thrillers as well, though I haven't read any of them so I couldn't say).
Which is not to say there's anything wrong with it, just that the overblown praise is a bit much for what is essentially a pretty workmanlike, and occasionally slightly clunkily written (though of course Reg Keeland's translation could be to blame) serial killer thriller. To pick a similar novel for comparison, it's neither as well-written nor as bonkers as Peter Høeg's
Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow, for example (though Smilla and Salander's shared quirky skills and up-front sexuality make them first cousins). The ending is oddly constructed as well; once the horrific family secrets are revealed we should really be wrapping things up and getting our coat, but instead we get another 70 pages or so of internal machinations at
Millennium and Salander's incomprehensible financial shenanigans in Zurich and the Cayman Islands, the purpose of all of which is to give the crooked financier who got Blomkvist sent to prison right at the beginning his comeuppance. Fine, but it doesn't really compare, excitement-wise, to the revelations that came before (not to mention the porn dungeon stuff).
There is also a disturbing undercurrent of sexual violence against women running through the book (as its original title
Män som hatar kvinnor – "Men Who Hate Women") shows more clearly. Whether the slightly unwholesome relish Larsson takes in describing all of this is mitigated by having a
Buffy-style ass-kicking heroine as well is a
subject of
interesting debate.
I'm sounding a bit down on the whole thing there, so just to recap: I wouldn't want you to think that
a) I didn't enjoy it and
b) I won't be reading the other two - I did, and I'm sure I will. Just, you know, let's all just calm down a bit.
Why? Well, I'm glad you asked. It's the length of the matches. Ever since the modern format of the tournament was established back in 1980 (the year before the first tournament I remember watching, Steve Davis' first title in 1981) the lengths of the five rounds in the main televised stages of the tournament have been as follows: best of 19, best of 25, best of 25, best of 31 and best of 35 (i.e. first to, respectively, 10, 13, 13, 16 and 18). The only change was in 1997 when they changed the semi-finals to be best of 33 (i.e. first to 17). So, in other words, the second round matches and the quarter-final matches are THE SAME LENGTH. It's literally madness, particularly when there are second round and quarter-final matches going on in parallel, because then you can't tell what stage it is just by looking at the "best of" figure on the screen. Also, while by this scheme the second round matches are deemed to be three frames more important than the first round matches, and the semi-finals a whopping four frames more important than the quarter-finals, the final is deemed only to be one frame more important than the semi-finals, which seems rather unsatisfactory.
And what was the source of the outrage? A just-for-fun list of things the Pope should consider doing on his impending trip to the UK. Now if you or I had been tasked with doing that (particularly on a Friday afternoon) we'd have come up with the usual nonsense about wrestling the Queen, nude, in a vat of baked beans, or chainsawing a live cow in half or something like that. But no, this was actually a list of quite sensible stuff like blessing a civil partnership, launching a helpline for abused children, etc.
Laughter is perhaps not the appropriate response to Damian Thompson's jaw-droppingly inane blog post on the subject in the Daily Telegraph (apparently it's all Political Correctness Gone Mad or something), at least once you realise that the commenters are not taking the piss. As always Poe's Law makes it hard to be sure, but hey, it's the Telegraph. Thompson has a fair bit of previous in this department as well.
I wonder if it's too optimistic of me to imagine the whiff of a paradigm shift in the air - all it takes is a few people to stop and examine the basis on which they give a free pass to certain groups to peddle bigotry and intolerance (not to mention actual criminal behaviour) and fleece their followers for enormous sums of money, and for other people to look round and go "well.....actually I was only doing it because you were", and suddenly the whole house of cards falls away and it becomes clear that there was just a small slimy tentacly green blob inside the Dalek costume all along. Or maybe it'll be a bit like this. By Vectron's knees!
Anyone regularly leaving the M5 at junction 16 as I do will know that there is currently a certain amount of seemingly purposeless digging and traffic cone activity at the Aztec West roundabout, and a corresponding reduction in the number of usable lanes. All the more surprising, then, to see a sign very like the one reproduced on the left here as I left the motorway. The irony was positively Morissettian.
Continuing my New Year's resolution to make it to more music gigs, we went to see Cerys Matthews in concert last week. I was never that big a fan of Catatonia, to be honest, but the tiny proportion of her solo output that I've heard suggested that she'd taken a turn for the acoustic/rootsy/folky/country since the band split up, which sounded a bit more interesting. More pertinently, though, the gig was scheduled to take place at the Riverfront Arts Centre in Newport, one of the few cultural bright spots in central Newport, which is otherwise a fairly unappealing concrete jungle without much in the way of nightlife. So I felt it was important to go along and give the place our support (and also some money) and also to check out the facilities. Plus it's only about ten minutes walk from the house.
It turns out the Riverfront is an attractively modern-looking building quite literally right on the riverfront (as the name suggests), and pleasantly light and airy inside - lots of whitewash and exposed wood, that sort of thing. The upstairs bar also sells bottled Rhymney Bitter which is very pleasant. The main auditorium probably holds about 500-600 people, I would guess, which is about the right size for an intimate gig featuring Cerys Matthews and two blokes with guitars sitting on chairs in the middle of the stage; they'd have seemed a bit lost at Wembley Stadium. Anyway, it was all very pleasant, Cerys' slightly scatty garrulous comedy Welsh barmaid persona is quite appealing, and the music was an entertaining mix of American and British folk tunes (plus a brief blast through Mulder And Scully for the Catatonia fans), concluding with a rousing singalong of Sosban Fach. Good stuff. Just enough time left for a couple of cheeky pints of Samuel Smith's in the Murenger House, and then home to bed.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.
The connection is that the launch took place at Battersea Power Station, famously used for the cover of the Floyd's 1977 album Animals, whence the lyrics in the Independent piece are taken (from Sheep, mostly, though there is a snippet of Pigs in there as well). One of their less well-known albums, it probably suffered from being an album released at the height of punk that featured just five songs: two of them being short acoustic bits of a minute or so each that bookend the other three which are 17, 11 and 10 minutes long respectively - not really in line with the punk ethos of 3 minutes, tops.
Incidentally I'm pretty sure Leviticus only specifically proscribes male homosexual activity; possibly for similar reasons British law only ever did the same - Queen Victoria apparently refusing to accept that lady homosexuals existed:
You see, you would think that on the face of it an organisation like the Catholic Church, which makes no particular secret of its opposition to sensible birth control and abortion, and indeed sex (sex with young boys excepted, of course) and women's rights in general, would be only too happy to trumpet these policies as publicly as possible. Not in this case, however, and for the same reason that I'd guess these Catholic-run "centres" probably tone down the old crucifix and Virgin Mary stuff on the signs as well: because their intent is to deceive, i.e. lure vulnerable women through the door with vague promises of "health advice" and "counselling" and only once they're safely inside reveal that this "advice" basically boils down to ABORTION IS MURDER and YOU ARE A WHORE and ONLY THROUGH JESUS CAN YOU BE FORGIVEN FOR YOUR WHORISH WHORISHNESS and so on and so forth.
