The Man Who Left Too Soon

by Barry Forshaw

He dials the emergency services.

  The ending of the remarkable second book in the trilogy has a markedly different feel to that of its predecessor. Whereas The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo functioned as a self-contained entity, Book Two feels very much like the consciously conceived second part of a sequence, with a masterly orchestration of effects leading inexorably to the final book of the Millennium Trilogy. And as the trilogy has clearly been conceived as an entity, there is no sense of the famous (and dreaded) ‘second book syndrome’ – whereby the debut book of a new novelist is followed by a marking-time, lower-key entry. In fact, Larsson didn’t have time for such niceties; everything had to be as near-fully-realised in its achievement as he could make it. Did he have a sense of his own pending mortality?

  CHAPTER 9

  THE BOOKS:

  The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest

  Atattooed young woman lies in intensive care, a bullet in her brain. A few rooms away is the man who has tried to kill her – her father. His body bears multiple axe injuries (inflicted by the young woman). If she recovers, she will face trial for three murders – but not if the man down the hall is able to kill her first.

  There’s no arguing that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest hits the ground running, and the pace rarely lets up for an arm-straining 600 pages. It’s an exhilarating, if exhausting, read. But the book is also something very special, and unique, in the world of crime thrillers.

  Once again, Stieg Larsson grabs our attention with his two protagonists: Lisbeth Salander and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who fights to clear her name – even though she dumped him as her lover. Salander’s numerous enemies here include some very nasty types, from her hideous father to equally murderous secret organisations and self-serving politicians. And these various nemeses all want her discredited – or dead. Larsson is unsparing in the area of grisly violence (one more characteristic – along with a vulnerable heroine – he shares with another bestselling author, Thomas Harris). But this is a strong and satisfying conclusion to a massively ambitious, richly detailed trilogy, and readers will regret that this is our last opportunity to share the invigorating company of Lisbeth Salander – until we watch the various films of the books.

  The minute and detailed analysis of plot incident with which the first two books have been addressed seems not quite as appropriate here; not because there is less plot (in many ways the narrative is as densely packed as before), but because there is a trajectory in which individual incident is perhaps not as important than the rounding off of certain themes and notions about the central characters. Part One is entitled ‘Intermezzo in a Corridor’, and this musical allusion is certainly on the ironic side. The musical form employed throughout this book is largely accelerando with none of the languor of an intermezzo.

  The chapter begins with a superscription concerning the hundreds of women who served during the American civil war disguised as men, and Larsson makes points about historians having difficulty dealing with gender distinctions. (His remark about women taking part in Swedish moose hunts has a certain unintended irony from a left-wing writer such as Larsson, when most readers’ image of a moose-hunting woman will be the extremely right-wing presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.) He goes on to discuss Amazons and warrior women, mentioning Boudicca, honoured with a statue in London on the Thames near Big Ben, and suggests that the reader ‘say hello to her if they pass by’. One might argue that his own warrior woman, Salander, is somebody one would be ill-advised to say a casual hello to. Particularly if you are a male who has been engaged in any inappropriate sexual activity.

  The doctor, Jonasson, who is reporting on Salander, is tired after a variety of life-saving operations, and is described as a goal-keeper standing between the patient and the funeral service, with his decisions ineluctably life-and-death ones – ironically, of course, life-and-death decisions are those repeatedly taken by the two protagonists throughout the length of the story. Jonasson is told that the girl lying injured in the hospital room is Lisbeth Salander – the girl who has been hunted for weeks for a triple murder in Stockholm. This does not particularly interest him, as he perceives his job to be that of saving a patient’s life. We are given a vivid picture of the barely controlled chaos of an A&E department, and a brief character sketch of the doctor, which some readers might see as irrelevant, but will now recognise this as a part of Larsson’s strategy to flesh out the bones of his narrative. We are given a report on the woman in her mid-20s who is lying, barely alive, with a weak pulse and various bullets in her body. The fact that she is still alive after having a bullet lodged so near her brain is considered something of a miracle.

  After this arresting opening, Larsson cuts to Blomkvist, looking at a clock and discovering that it is after three o’clock in the morning. He is handcuffed, exhausted and sitting at a kitchen table in a farmhouse near Nossebro. Blomkvist is remonstrating with a man who is keeping him prisoner, calling him an imbecile: ‘I warned you he was dangerous, for Christ’s sake… I told you that you would have to handle him like a live grenade.’ Blomkvist is in a state of some depression, having found Salander after midnight, wounded in what might be a mortal fashion. He had sent for the rescue service and the police. The medics had also taken care of Alexander Zalachenko. We are reminded that this man was both Salander’s father and her worst enemy – he had tried to kill her and had earned an axe wound in his face and considerable damage to one of his legs for the attempt.

  Calling Erika Berger on his mobile, Blomkvist fills her in on the situation, pointing out that Salander is the one who is in considerable danger. The policeman with whom Blomkvist is so infuriated is Paulsson, who is presented by Larsson as the most thick-headed kind of copper. Blomkvist tries to explain that the man who had actually committed the murders in Stockholm was not Lisbeth but Ronald Niedermann, an incredibly powerful man who had been left sitting tied to a traffic sign in a ditch. The attempt to arrest him by Paulsson’s men has, of course, resulted in bloody violence and the escape of a highly dangerous man. Blomkvist insists that a call is made to Inspector Bublanski – a policeman that the journalist knows he can trust.

  We then cut to another sympathetic copper, Inspector Modig. She has awoken at four o’clock to learn from Bublanski that everything ‘has gone to hell down in Trollhättan’. She is told that Blomkvist found Salander, Niedermann and Zalachenko, and her colleague gives her a rough idea of the state of things. These two intelligent police officers realise that the situation has degenerated into something like chaos. A further police discussion ties up plot elements with which the reader is now familiar – such as the fact that the ruthless Zalachenko is Lisbeth’s father and was a hitman for Russian military intelligence, who defected in the 1970s and has been running his own criminal network since that date. All of this is conveyed by Blomkvist, who now looks utterly exhausted. Inspector Erlander, listening to the summing up (including the fact that Salander is innocent of the murders she is accused of) finds himself willing to listen, particularly as he does not give much credence to the deductions of the inefficient Paulsson. However, the story is so outrageous that he finds his credulity being stretched.

  Larsson takes us back to the hospital room where Doctor Jonasson is pulling off his bloodstained gloves after the operation. We don’t yet know the result. Blomkvist, meanwhile, has persuaded Erlander that Salander was shot and buried at the farmhouse, but has somehow managed to survive and dig herself free. The police continue to search for the escaped monster who had cut a swathe through their ranks – a missing patrol car is discovered, and it is supposed that the escaped criminal has switched vehicles. Blomkvist asks if there is any information concerning Salander’s condition and is told that she has been operated on during the night, with a bullet being removed from her head. He asks about Zalachenko and the police at that point are not aware who he is talking about. However, Blomkvist learns that Lisbeth’s father was also operated on last night for a deep gash across his face and another below
the kneecap. His injuries are severe but not life-threatening. Blomkvist is talking to Modig who, broadly speaking, he trusts. He points out that he knows Salander’s secret hideout, but as she has spent considerable time creating the bolt hole for herself he has no intention of revealing it to them. Modig reminds him that this is a murder investigation, to which Blomkvist snaps, ‘You still haven’t got it, have you?’ Lisbeth is in fact innocent and the police have violated her and destroyed her reputation in ways that beggar belief.

  This is, of course, part of the strategy that has been necessary throughout the three books and is not a million miles away from the tactics utilised by Hitchcock in such films as North By Northwest and The Thirty-Nine Steps: make it absolutely imperative that the central protagonist cannot call on the police for help, so that they are always at the extreme reaches of danger from both the heavies and the forces of the establishment. Of course, things are ratcheted up to the nth degree in the Millennium Trilogy, but the process remains a sound one in terms of engaging the reader’s sympathy. Blomkvist, of course, is more like most readers in being the person who is able to talk to the police and, to some degree, help to clarify the strands of the tangled narrative.

  By now, more and more police are involved, several of whom are convinced that Salander was guilty of murder, and there is perhaps a danger that the author has introduced too many police officers, both sympathetic and otherwise, into the narrative – it is undoubtedly true that even the most well-disposed of readers sometimes have to struggle to remember which particular copper is being talked about at any moment (perhaps another reminder that a few profitable pruning sessions with an editor would have been an asset for Larsson). Later, Blomkvist remembers that his rental car was still at the farm, but he was too exhausted to call for it. Erlander arranges for the car to be picked up. It is at this point that the journalist makes a significant call, to someone he can trust – his sister Advokat Annika Giannini, a woman who will figure importantly in the narrative. When he has explained Salander’s extreme situation, Annika asks if Lisbeth might require her services as a lawyer. Her brother replies that the accused woman isn’t the type to ask anyone for help, but it is clear that from this point on – whether she wants it or not – Salander is to have someone else on her side. It might be noted that Larsson both admires Lisbeth’s self-sufficiency and simultaneously regards it as, finally, inadequate – she needs help, just as she herself offers it to a chosen few. She is, we are reminded, an incomplete personality.

  The police search for the grotesque Niedermann continues, without much success (Larsson is aware that a man of such a distinctive appearance should be easy to track down, and does have his characters acknowledge this). The police talk about an inventory of the woodshed in which Zalachenko was found and there is another one of the author’s famous trouncings of an unsympathetic character (in this case, not – as is usual – a violent one). The wrong-headed Paulsson is disbelieved by all of his colleagues and has collapsed from exhaustion. There is general dissatisfaction about the fact that the incompetent policeman arrested Blomkvist. Finally, the ludicrous idea of a lesbian Satanist gang in Stockholm is trashed, and the police realise that Säpo, the security services, are involved and that perhaps – as Blomkvist claimed – there has been some kind of cover-up. The reader, of course, is aware that Zalachenko is being protected after his defection, and the attempted framing of Salander is all part of this fairly despicable attempt at concealment. The police finally realise that the next logical step is to interrogate Zalachenko with a view to finding out what he has to say about the murders in Stockholm – as well as learning Niedermann’s role in Zalachenko’s business (it is accepted that Zalachenko may be able to point them in the direction of the violent missing man).

  As often happens in the trilogy, we are taken back to the offices of the magazine Millennium, and it is interesting to note how well these sections always function within the context of the novel – possibly because while much authorial invention is required for the more outlandish developments in the plot, in the sections involving the magazine, Larsson is able to draw upon his own experience in such environments to create a total verisimilitude. Erika Berger is talking to Blomkvist’s sister Annika, and the editor tells the lawyer that she is planning to resign from the magazine but hasn’t yet been able to tell her colleague and lover as he is so involved in the chaos surrounding Salander. Erika is, in fact, leaving to be the editor-in-chief of another prestigious journal – basically, an offer she cannot refuse. For the rest of the chapter, we are filled in on the dynamics of Millennium itself – not least the fact that its survival is now possibly in some doubt.

  Chapter 3 begins in the company of the deeply unpleasant Zalachenko, who has been awake for several hours when inspectors Modig and Erlander arrive in his room. He has undergone an extensive operation in which a large section of his jaw has been realigned and set with titanium screws. The axe blow has apparently crushed his cheekbone and taken off a section of the flesh on the right side of his face. He is now, appropriately, physically the kind of monster that he has long been morally. Zalachenko’s approach with the two policemen is to pretend that he is now a broken man, old and lacking in physical resources. He points out that he had felt threatened by Niedermann, and when he is asked why his daughter threw a Molotov cocktail into his car in the early 1990s, he replies in a hostile tone that Salander is mentally ill.

  Provocatively (playing good cop, bad cop), Modig decides to go in for the kill, by asking if his daughter’s actions had anything to do with the fact that he, Zalachenko, had beaten Lisbeth’s mother so badly that she suffered long-term brain damage. Zalachenko’s reply is characteristic: ‘That is all bullshit. Her mother was a whore. It was probably one of her punters who beat her up. I just happened to be passing by.’ Zalachenko points out that he wishes to press charges against his daughter for trying to kill him. Modig decides to dispense with any attempt at politeness and points out to Zalachenko that she now understands why his daughter would try to drive an axe into his head.

  At this point in the novel, of course, its most charismatic and iconic character has been notable for her absence for some time – Larsson appreciates that he needs to ration out the appearances of his characters for them to retain their mystique. Salander awakes, aware of the smell of almonds and ethanol, and voices around her note that she is finally coming around. She can barely speak as Doctor Jonasson tells her that he has operated on her after an injury. Lisbeth has only vague memories of the appalling violence and conflict she has been through – and in which she has taken a considerable part herself.

  Having established his heroine again, swimming back to a kind of consciousness and coherence, Larsson returns the narrative to Blomkvist, who has booked himself into a hotel room and is starting to feel human once again. Blomkvist is stunned to learn that Erika has decided to take a job on another magazine and rather hurt to find that he is the last to find out. As often before, Larsson now reintroduces us into the company of his deeply unpleasant heavies, notably the violent Nieminen, still smarting (both physically and otherwise) over the punishment he has undergone at the hands of the slight (but devastating) Salander. Nieminen and his equally unpleasant colleague Waltari find the murdered bodies of two of their associates: the woman’s neck has been broken and her head turned through 180 degrees, while the man has had his larynx rammed deep into his throat. The criminals are conscious of the fact that Niedermann was on the run and needed cash – the man he has murdered is the one who handles the money. The duo realise that they must track down Niedermann, which will require every contact they have in the clubs all over Scandinavia (one of them says: ‘I want that bastard’s head on a platter’).

  Salander, in the hospital room, is slowly recuperating and talking to another doctor. At the same time, Zalachenko, still in extreme pain, is being visited by the police (including ‘that bloody Modig woman’) but he is not offering any suggestions as to how to track down Niedermann – now
pursued by both the police and the heavies. Zalachenko begins to calculate how he is going to come out at the other end of this situation, and consults his colleagues in the security services as to how he can effect damage control. While Larsson presents the spooks as unsympathetic, they are mere beginners compared to the man they are helping, who says – about his own daughter – that she has to disappear. Her testimony must be declared invalid, and she will have to be committed to a mental institution for the rest of her life.

  We are, of course, once again in the kind of situation that Larsson has frequently created for his beleaguered heroine, and it is a mark of his skill that he is still able to persuade the reader that such things could still happen, given the number of people who now know how Salander has been framed. However, it is perhaps easy to see from this that the perfect number of books to feature Salander was three – after a trilogy, it would be extremely unconvincing if the author were obliged to keep putting his heroine back into this particular situation ad infinitum.

  Of the various scenarios that Larsson created to turn the screws on his protagonists, perhaps the most striking is the fact that Salander is recuperating in a hospital room just a few doors away from her murderous father. Blomkvist visits the other sympathetic male ‘protector’ of Lisbeth – her some-time employer Armansky – and asks the latter whether he can trust him or not. Armansky replies ‘I’m her friend. Although, as you know, that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying she’s my friend.’ But while Armansky is not prepared to engage in any sort of criminal activity, he is happy to listen to any strategy that Blomkvist might suggest in order to help Lisbeth. This, of course, involves Blomkvist’s sister Annika representing her legally. At this point, Larsson introduces another new character, an ex-Senior Administrative Officer at the Security Police, the elderly Gullberg who, although he has retired, still maintains a professional alertness.