We meet bad-girl Salander and the intrepid Blomkvist about a year after the first book ended; Salander has been traveling the world, spending the billions she stole from Wennerstrom, and Blomkvist has been enjoying his newfound fame. Shortly after Salander returns, and after Blomkvist has signed on to publish an expose about the sex trade in Sweden, its author and his wife are killed unexpectedly--and quite brutally mangled. Salander's prints are found on the weapon, which belonged to her former guardian (also found dead), so she becomes the prime suspect in the police investigation. Blomkvist of course launches his own investigation, as well as her former boss Armansky. What seemed like an open-and-shut case turns into an increasingly tangled web of intrigue involving the secret police and a motorcycle gang.
There actually isn't much to say about Stieg Larsson's sequel to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo that doesn't also apply to the first--especially not without giving a lot of the plot away. In many ways it's more exciting than the original. People are actually murdered and tortured in this one, and our protagonist narrowly escapes with her life in the climatic ending. It's also funnier--the police investigation and media blitz, involving people who know nothing about Salander, are at times farcical--they sometimes come to crazy conclusions, and the whole "lesbian satanist cult" thing is often brought up until things get serious. You will get angry at this book several times--not only because of the gross misperceptions of Salander as a cold-blooded psychopath (she's a righteous cold-blooded psychopath) and the horrible violence committed against her and her allies, but also because the immense number of jerks and assholes in this crop.
It also moves a hella lot more quickly--whereas in Dragon Tattoo it took 300 pages before it became sustainably interesting (rather than a brief burst of excitement for like 5 pages followed by over 50 pages of boring), it took less than 200 in Fire. As expected, we learn a lot more about Lisbeth Salander's past, including "all the Evil" that remains as a gap in her record. With every new revelation there's a new twist, as both Blomkvist and Salander try to solve the murders separately, and with little help from one another. When it ends, with no denouement, there are still questions to be answered. In a lot of ways, this sequel was like a lot of other second-chapters in trilogies: it gets to the action more quickly since we don't need to be introduced to the main characters, we learn some new revelations about the most mysterious character, and we go down a rabbit hole of intrigue that unearths more mysteries than it solves. There's a big burst of action towards the very end, leaving little to no room for a resolution, hanging on a cliff. If you read and watch a lot of trilogies (as I have), they tend to contain these peculiarities of structure that differ from a one-shot. Some movie trilogies make a lame attempt at a resolution, but there's still something left unresolved at the end.
That said, The Girl Who Played with Fire does some things right that many sequels get wrong. The characters are consistent (Salander is still her lovably ruthless self, Blomkvist still insufferably diligent and brown-nosy), there's nothing that comes up that directly contradicts something that happened in the first book (and I HATE that), and while Salander's survival at the end is highly improbable (probably impossible), most of the escalating action isn't. I daresay it's an improvement to the original: more exciting, more Salander, less romance, more mystery. I got through this in much less time, too: while Dragon Tattoo took me 3 weeks, Fire took only 10 days. 4 out of 5 stars.
Now, on to the final installment!
No comments:
Post a Comment