Barrel Strength

Stieg Larsson’s Elizabeth Salander series is a moderately entertaining read, despite everything bad I am going to say about it. Having stayed up too late last night finishing the last of the  series, I must complain about some of Larsson’s tedious moralizing leftism, and his dhimmitude to women.  

Lest you think me unfair imputing leftism to Larsson,  which oozes through the books, the Wikipedia entry for him states:

Larsson was initially a political activist for the Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet (Communist Workers League), a photographer, and one of Sweden’s leading science fiction fans.[3] In politics he was the editor of the Swedish Trotskyist journal Fjärde internationalen. He also wrote regularly for the weekly Internationalen

The series of three books is built around various men behaving badly towards women. Even the male protagonist, the journalist Blomkvist, is criticized for a love ‘em and leave ‘em attitude. What was Stieg Larsson repenting? 

Blomkvist’s fictional sister says of him: “He screws his way through life and doesn’t seem to grasp how much it can hurt women who think of him as more than a casual affair.”

The strange, anti-social heroine, Lizbeth Salander, has been the subject of a vast conspiracy to ruin her life, run by a section of Swedish Security Police.

Her father, former member of Russia’s military intelligence,  ran a white slavery business; her half-brother murders women for sport.

A colleague of one of the central women in the story sends her vicious emails because she would not look at him in high school.

The central villain in the first Stieg Larsson book tortures women to death in his basement.

Salander, the heroine, is attacked  by biker thugs, of whom she disposes readily.

Her father puts a .22 bullet in her head.

It goes on and on.

Like many modern books, the last one in the series needs a thorough editing. The first half of the book could have been dropped with no loss of interest or importance to the devlopment of the plot. In fact the second and third books are badly written. Far too many characters are introduced. The plots go nowhere for weeks of fictional time.

Then there is the relentless recitation of facts and brand names which characterize modern police procedurals. No one has an orange soda; they have a Ramlosa (European brand name). Every car trip is described street by street: for example – “She turned left of Helmansgatan, drove a couple of blocks to Svavelsjo, and parked in front of the Tre Kronor.” Who gives a damn?

The weirdest thing, for a North American, is the feeling that in Sweden, we are seeing a vision of our own future. Larsson envisions a society so tightly bound up in procedural fairness and privacy laws that its organs of state seem barely able to function. The police are barely effective. The state also seems to have a thing against people taking measures to defend themselves. For example, the heroine Salander is charged with manslaughter for killing her father, after the fucker had popped a .22 into her head, and she had clawed her way out of a shallow grave and subsequently put an axe in his face. Credentialism runs unchecked: there is a sort of collective gasp of awe when the  lawyer defending Salander at her trial reveals that she has a degree in pyschology. Whoopie doo!

Stieg Larsson’s male lead, Blomkvist, says towards the end of the tale, that the principal issue is men’s violence towards women.

I agree that the villains in Larsson’s books are all men and they richly deserve the fates he devises for them, but a moment’s reflection will indicate that each sex can be evil in the manner of their own kind. I suspect that Stieg Larsson would not agree to the proposition that men and women are morally equal.

Sweden is the place where one of the Muhammad cartoonists  is assaulted when he tries to give a lecture at a university, where he sleeps in different houses at night, and where the burka-clad woman who calls for his death does so with impunity, where the Malmo fire department needs police protection to enter Muslim parts of town, and yet the imaginiation of the earnest dweeb leftist Stieg Larsson is taken up with violence against women of every kind except the principal source, even in his own country, Islam. Go figure.

You can wait for the movies of the Larsson books; they will be more tightly edited.

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A good review of the books – one which agrees with me – can be found in an interview with Larsson’s wife, Eva Gabrielsson, in the Guardian, of all places.