I've had more thoughts about this book, no doubt precipitated by the review of
the Hebrew translation which appeared in yesterday's newspaper (the
translation has curiously lost its definite articles, so it is now "Girl with
a dragon tattoo") as well as cogitation about some of the Amazon reviews. Such
reviews are torn between the desire to tell what the book is about (so that
people will know whether the subject interests them) and the need to review
(criticise and praise) the writing. Here I have no such problem: I don't need
to tell the story and I can give as many spoilers as I want.
One person wrote about how the characters don't develop (surely, one of the
tenets of fiction is that at least one character has an epiphany which changes
how she feels about life and coincidentally helps her provide the story with a
resolution). Another reviewer noted in response that in real life, people
don't really change. Whilst that is mainly true, I know that I am trying to
change, or at least deepen my understanding of what is happening around me in
the hope that I will be able to impress myself more on the environment, or
have the environment impress itself less on me (current book "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Arieli, which I was given as a New Year's gift yesterday). Going
back to the matter at hand, Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous girl with the
dragon tattoo, does change, although
that doesn't seem to affect the story's resolution.
The real problem with the book is that it's really two stories in one. Now, I
know that a good book has a plot and a sub-plot, but this one has two plots,
neither of which is dominant to the other, and this is what caused the feeling
of anti-climax at the end of one of those plots. The book could either have
been about the search for Harriet Vanger, or it could have been about the
shady financier Wennerstrom. The background material (whilst overly done) fits
into both stories equally well. The only links between the two stories (apart
from the characters) is Henrik Vanger's desire to bring Wennerstrom down, and
his feeble promise about the material necessary to do so.
True, protagonist Mikael Blomkvist was lured into the Vanger plot by being
promised the hot material on Wennerstrom, and his actions in the Vanger plot
lead to him linking up with Salander, but otherwise the two plots have nothing
to do with each other.
Ian Rankin, in his Rebus novels, usually has three or even four plots runnning
in the book, but they run in parallel and are solved simultaneously by the end
of the book. This has often given me a
deux ex machina feeling about some of
the stories; whilst I know that life - and especially police work - is not so
simple, in that plots run into each other with no apparent beginning or end,
and can run side by side (but not necessarily in tandem) for years, I am aware
of literary constraints which demand that most (if not all) loose ends are
tied by the end of the book. I often wondered what would happen if Rankin (or
Peter Robinson, or any other detective novelist) would introduce a thread
which does not get solved by the end
of the book.
Steig Larsson has written a book with two concurrent but non-parallel plots;
whilst both plots have conclusions, they are not simultaneous. So this book
answers in part my query about how such a book would feel. And having read
this book, I now know the answer: due to literary conventions and the escapist
need to have a complete ending, I prefer Rankin with his multiple and parallel
plots which finish simultaneously.
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