The Man Who Left Too Soon
Page 28
‘On the other hand, Stieg was very much concerned with attitudes to women in his magazine articles; he’d talk about how (for instance) the far Right would say “feminism was destroying Christianity” – to which I’d say, “Bring it on! What’s the problem?” But seriously, it was perfectly obvious that improving the treatment of women in society was an absolutely crucial tenet for him.
‘One could say that his change of career from a journalist to novelist – although he didn’t live to see the second career flourish – was in some ways a very apposite move. Fiction possibly changes lives more than journalism because of the way it sucks you in emotionally. After all, people who read right-wing newspapers in the UK such as the Daily Mail are having their prejudices and attitudes confirmed – that’s the raison d’être of a paper like that (as it is, I suppose, of left-wing papers such as the Guardian). The opinions of readers are confirmed and justified on a day-to-day basis – what they already believe. Whatever our viewpoint may be, I think many of us read novels in a more open state, with political decision-making kept somewhat at bay. And if a good novelist can spring a provocative idea on the reader – within the context of a gripping narrative – it is just possible that attitudes can be changed, or at least confronted. Look, for instance, at how many crime readers – myself included – avidly read the novels of P D James and Ruth Rendell, whose social politics are totally different (in Parliament, they sit on opposite sides of the House).
‘And if Stieg and I are political writers, that doesn’t necessarily mean that we would alienate readers of other, different political persuasions – at least not in the way that political writing in a newspaper would. If you’re about to draw readers into a novel, and you say something nice about something they disapprove of, it doesn’t mean that they will stop reading. When I wrote A Darker Domain, which dealt with the very divisive miners’ strike in Britain in the 1970s, there were people coming up to me in the south of England who were saying “I had no idea things were so bad in the mining communities”. And I didn’t create a sentimental vision of the miners, I think I painted a warts-and-all picture. For instance, I was very critical of the miners’ leaders – you could paraphrase the famous observation about “lions being led by donkeys”.
‘Important issues can be discussed in the context of the novel – and the novelist can give you all sides of an argument, along with key insights. And to some degree, I think that is one of the things that Stieg Larsson does in his books – he grants us an insight into a society that we think we know – but really have an incomplete view of.
‘What really intrigues me is: where was he coming from? I would have loved to talk to him about so many things – something, of course, I can’t do now. Often when you find writers who feel almost obsessively about certain issues, there is something about childhood which has provoked or formed that attitude. Stieg lived with his grandparents as a child, for instance, until he was nine years old – that would have affected me, and I would love to talk to him about what he took from that – what his response was as a child, then as an adult. And feminism, of course – I know that there was a lot of suspicion in the women’s movement about men who were sympathetic, and who hung around with women. Rather than being applauded, the response sometimes was “Is this the only way you can get laid?”
‘Regarding the moment in Stieg Larsson’s life when he became the passionate feminist he was, I’m reminded of something involving one of the great crime writers of the past, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There was an incident that changed the way he looked at the world. When he was a war correspondent during the First World War, he went with Rebecca West to a factory in the west of Scotland where they made cordite – in fact the factory was nine miles long, the biggest factory of its kind in the world. Most of the factory workers were of necessity women, as so many of the men were at the front. And seeing women working under often hazardous conditions, and being such a key part of the war effort, he said decisively “Women should get the vote. They have a perfect right to say what’s what when peace comes.” In fact, that is the precise point at which Conan Doyle became a feminist.
‘Of course, however radical you think yourself (and I’m sure that Stieg Larsson, like me, would like to think that he would always be an anti-establishment figure) the danger is actually about becoming just the opposite – something, of course, that he never had time to do.’
Plates
The man who left too soon – a portrait of Stieg Larsson taken in Stockholm in 2004, the year he died.
Larsson and his long-term partner, Eva Gabrielsson, relaxing over a cup of coffee in Strängnäs, Sweden.
At work at TT, the Swedish news agency, in Stockholm in the mid-1990s.
On a visit to Hong Kong, August 1987.
Larsson on the Trans-Siberian Railway, July 1987.
Working as a news graphic illustrator at the TT Feature and Photo desk.
Larsson, a keen sailor, relaxing below deck on his boat ‘Josephine’.
Sailing the Stockholm archipelago, with Eva Gabrielsson.
Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, who plays Lisbeth Salander, and Danish director Niels Arden Oplev, at the Paris premiere of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in May 2009.
Guests wait in line outside the Sergel cinema in Stockholm, 14 September 2009, for the gala premiere of The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second film in the Millennium Trilogy.
Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson’s partner, pictured holding a copy of the Swedish edition of Män som hatar kvinnor (‘Men Who Hate Women’), which was published in English as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist.© Alliance Films
The poster for the last of the three films.© Alliance Films
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First published in hardback in 2010
Updated paperback published 2011
ISBN: 978 1 84358 370 7
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