The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson
MacLehose Press, £18.99
How times change. When The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first novel by Stieg Larsson, a Swedish journalist who, before his untimely death in 2004, worked tirelessly and fearlessly in the fight against fascism in northern Europe, was published in Britain in January last year it was regarded as something of a curiosity. Reviews were generally kind – on these pages I wrote: “Even if you’re not normally a fan of thrillers, I urge you to read this book because it’s an intelligent contemporary novel as well as a rattling good read” – but thin on the ground. Probably because interest in detective fiction in translation, with the exception of Maigret, has never been big in Britain.
When The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second novel in the series, was published in January this year, interest (and sales) were greater. Partly because of the buzz around the film of the first book, which was released in Scandinavia at the same time, partly because of sales in the rest of the world but mostly, I suspect, because of word of mouth. People who bought it, read it, and told their friends.
Now with the publication (brought forward from January next year to take advantage of the surge in sales in the autumn) of the third and final book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, interest is phenomenal. The papers have been full of feature articles as well as book reviews and the new novel has been prominently displayed in bookshop windows. It’s odd. Because Larsson is dead, there can be no newspaper interviews or book signings to promote the new novel, and his politics, and subject matter, are not the stuff of which bestsellers are normally made. But it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
Karl Stig-Erland Larsson was born at Västerbotten in northern Sweden in 1954. He was a young activist with the Communist Workers League, edited the Trotskyist journal Fjärde Internationalen, and several science fiction fanzines, before becoming a graphic designer with the news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, the Scandinavian equivalent of the Press Association, from 1977 to 1999.
He helped start Stop the Racism in the mid-1980s and, after eight people were killed by neo-Nazis in Sweden in 1995, the Expofoundation dedicated to exposing fascists in Scandinavia. He became editor-in-chief of Expo in 1999, went into schools to talk about the evils of racism, lectured about the threat of the extreme right at seminars in Brussels, and contributed for many years to Searchlight here in Britain.
Shortly before he died from a sudden heart attack at the age of 50 – there were suggestions he was murdered by the extreme right; more likely it was the result of stress, overwork and the 60 hand-rolled cigarettes he smoked each day – he finished his Millennium trilogy. Nothing to do with the new millennium; Millennium is the title of the (fictional) investigative monthly magazine for which his central character, the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, works. The tragedy, of course, is that Larsson did not live to see any of the novels published or enjoy the fruits of his labours. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was first published in Sweden in 2005 and the trilogy has since become a publishing phenomenon, and not only in Scandinavia. Worldwide sales, to date, are a staggering
12 million.
In that first book Blomkvist, Larsson’s alter ego, and Lisbeth Salander, a feisty bisexual computer whizz and the girl with the dragon tattoo, are hired by a rich businessman to solve the unexplained disappearance of his niece 40 years ago. What appears at first to be the case of a missing girl becomes a much bigger, and dirtier, story as with each rock they turn over they uncover another dark secret about big corporations, men who abuse women and the extreme right just before, during and after the Second World War. In The Girl Who Played with Fire, Blomkvist, by now Salander’s on-off lover, investigates a gang of brutal gangsters with far right connections who are trafficking girls from Eastern Europe into Sweden to work as prostitutes.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest picks up where the previous book ends – just minutes later. In fact, while The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a stand alone novel, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest are actually one long book which has been chopped in half and published as two separate novels. Which, as one runs to 569 pages and the other to 602, is not really surprising.
Since the film – directed by Niels Arden Oplev and starring Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Norén – was released, Salander has come to be seen as a sassier, smarter, politically turned-on version of Lara Croft. But Larsson imagined her as “a grown up Pippi Longstocking” – which is more interesting, because Pippi Longstocking was written by Astrid Lindgren, who also wrote the Kalle Blomkvist stories, and in the books Larsson has Salander frequently refer to her fellow investigator and occasional lover as “Kalle Bastard Blomkvist” knowing he hates any reference to the famous, if fictional, child detective.
In this book, Larsson turns his fire on Säpo, the Swedish Security Service, and the secret state as Blomkvist and Salander investigate the connections between big business, conservative politicians, far-right elements in the police, army and intelligence services, racist skinheads and drug-dealing libertarian motorcycle gangs. He mixes together real events, such as the unsolved murder of the popular and outspoken left-wing Prime Minister Olof Palme, with fictitious (and sometimes thinly-veiled) stories about the defection from the Soviet Union of Alexander Zalachenko, a high-ranking GRU agent, and Salander’s father, in an exhilarating political cocktail which exposes what happens when “patriotic” elements in the security services treat democratic socialists as the enemy within. It’s that rare thing: a thoughtful thriller with its head as well as its heart in the right place. But if you haven’t yet got the Millennium bug, this isn’t the best place to begin. Start with the first book and read ’em right through.
One final thought. The first book was published at £14.99, the second at £16.99 and this, the third, at £18.99. Now Christopher MacLehose is a good egg and his list is an imprint at Quercus, an independent without the resources of the big multinationals. But costs haven’t risen and one cannot help wondering what that young activist with the Communist Workers League, were he still alive, would have to say about that…
Keith Richmond
