The second entry in the Millennium trilogy had the same impression on me as the first: an interesting mystery with fascinating characters that somehow never seems to work itself up past a low hum.
Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant, distant young hacker with a horrifying past, was put through the paces as a sidekick in the first book; this time, she takes center stage. Redeemed journalist Mikael Blomvkvist is working with two freelancing friends on an expose of sex trafficking in Sweden. When his friends end up dead, however, Salander's prints are found on the murder weapon. Suddenly, the intensely private Salander finds herself on the front page of every newspaper in Sweden, with multiple organizations tracking her down and most of the country convinced that she is a retarded psychopath. As Blomkvist attempts to find her and help her, he uncovers not only her surprising connections to the case, but begins to gain insight on how she became the surly loner she is. Meanwhile, Salander has to evade the tightening noose of journalists and police officers as she attempts to finish what the murder victims started.
Here's the main problem I have with this book: the events above, which are advertised on the book jacket, don't actually happen until hundreds of pages in. As with the first book, Larsson takes the scenic route to the actual mystery, and in the meantime, we get a completely unrelated vignette of Salander's Caribbean adventures, a subplot with Erika Berger that ends up going nowhere, and about a third or so of the actual IKEA catalog, as far as I can tell. Once things actually start happening, they don't actually get interesting until around page 400 or so. And even the intense action sequences are rendered in Larsson's usual laconic, Prozac-laden drone, so that the most suspenseful scenes still feel clinical. Also, everyone in Sweden apparently buys dinner at 7-11. Weird.
Oddly enough, all of that doesn't make for a bad read. Once again, I was invested in the story the whole way through, because I'm a fan of character work and these books are basically proving to be a series of detailed character sketches. I felt that the second book was actually more tightly plotted than the first. Even though the pacing still feels completely broken, the mystery is definitely less scattered and clumsy than the one in the first book.
There's another annoyance that set in for me partway through this book, though. For all that Larsson's characters are interesting, I don't really buy the way in which he portrays female characters. I mean, being male, I could be completely off-base here, but each time I was presented with a female character, I couldn't get past the image of a male author trying to approximate a female voice. Salander's crass treatment in the first book gets a little more dimension in this one, and new insights into her psychological profile explain her voice a bit, but Mimmi? Modig? Johannson? Every last one of them reads like a middle-aged male fantasy of what a strong, sexual woman should sound like (which, by the way, is exactly how Salander and Berger came off in the first book, I'm realizing). Again, just my impression; I didn't buy them, and I'm beginning to understand why some readers classify the books as mildly misogynistic.
Don't get me wrong, these books are good. I mean, they're... I don't know, competent. But I can't really wrap my head around the wild praise I keep hearing. The characterizations are largely great, but the writing is uneven, the pace is completely boned, and the narrative forgoes descriptive prose in favor of mountains of technical details. Also, I think maybe something is lost in translation, as some of the dialogue is painfully awkward and sometimes even nonsensical, which seems out of place amidst the painstaking prose in the rest of the book.
Yeah, I'm picking on it a little. But even if I didn't get very excited about this book, I never lost interest, either. In fact, the focus on Salander is incredibly satisfying. I'd have even been pleasantly surprised by some of her backstory, if the director who made the Swedish movie out of the first book didn't decide to spoil this book in that movie. Goddamned jerk. Anyway, even though I'm whinging a little about this book, it's not bad at all. It's a decent thriller, and it definitely benefits from a comparison to the first in the trilogy.
Verdict: 3 out of 5
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