The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is a competent, albeit problematic conclusion to the Millenium series, written by Stieg Larsson. The book brings together the trilogy’s best features, with a narrative that is socially engaged and deeply concerned with violence against women, but also many of its worst flaws, such as useless plotlines and dialogues full of exposition.

The story begins immediately after the end of the previous book, with protagonist Lisbeth Salander being hospitalized after her encounter with Alexander Zalachenko, a Russian spy who sought political asylum in Sweden. Since Mikael Blomkvist is threatening to publish a story on Zalachenko, some SÄPO officials, from the Swedish Security Service, realize the danger that their institution is in and devise a plan to take control of the situation.

In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Stieg Larsson abandons virtually all the elements of a detective story that defined the first book of the trilogy and makes the narrative borrow the elements of a spy thriller. This change matches Larsson’s typical journalistic style, crafting a narrative that doesn’t hesitate in thoroughly analyzing the Sweden Security Service, for example, delving deep into its bureaucratic procedures, its history after World War II, its various departments, and its importance to its country.

Larsson’s prose is usually packed with detail. His narrator is not satisfied, for example, with simply stating that Lisbeth and her fellow hackers had no difficulty in tracing certain calls or invading a particular computer, making a point of explaining in detail the methods they used, which ends up serving two purposes: it gives more realism to their actions and makes the information work as an alert to the reader about the existence of some technologies, as can be observed in the following passage:

“But Trinity and Bob the Dog devoted the best part of a week to identifying and separating out Ekström’s mobile from the background noise of about 200,000 other mobile telephones within a kilometre of police headquarters. They used a technique called Random Frequency Tracking System. The technique was not uncommon. It had been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, and was built into an unknown number of satellites that performed pinpoint monitoring of capitals around the world as well as flashpoints of special interest.”

The book’s narrative is initially divided into several threads. One follows the investigations surrounding the whereabouts of Ronald Niedermann, Zalachenko’s right-hand man, who, still on the run, begins to leave a trail of blood during his escape through Sweden. Another thread sees Mikael being chased by secret agents while trying to produce the material for his magazine. And a third one focuses on Lisbeth, who is hospitalized in a room right next to her biggest enemy and so is trying to find a way to kill him unnoticed.

The hatred between Lisbeth and Zalachenko – the main point of suspense at the beginning– is well-developed: both characters often find themselves reflecting on how they could end their nemesis using the few resources they have at their disposal, ignoring the critical state of their health. At one point, for example, the spy struggles just to walk slowly to the front of Salander’s room and watch her for a few seconds, when, sweaty and without energy, he has to return to his own room to rest. The tension in the scene is palpable: the reader understands that, if even unbearable pain is incapable of stopping them, a confrontation is inevitable.

Larsson rightly introduces the point of view of the SÄPO agents early in the book, taking special care to not vilify the whole Secret Service, making the villains be part of a special section within SÄPO, known only to its members and simply referred to as “Section”. The huge chapter in which they reflect on their stories and motivations is central to the narrative because it’s these agents and not Zalachenko and Niedermann the true antagonists in the book. Besides that, following the point of view of the agent Gullberg is also essential to make the first turning point in the story surprising and shocking: the author contrasts the cold and reflective nature of the character with the violence of his actions.

In The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander was a character that acted as judge, jury, and executioner, punishing those who threatened and hurt women. Here Larsson brings this idea to the next stage, making the narrative follow the whole investigation process that intends to punish the characters who mistreated Salander her entire life and make them finally face justice.

There are no shades of gray in the characters. Mikael Blomkvist, for example, doesn’t have any flaw whatsoever; he is upright to the extreme and the representation of the utopian journalist. The SÄPO agents are psychopaths who seem to know only how to lie, manipulate others, and solve their problems by murdering people. Larsson separates the characters into three easily identifiable groups: the good, the bad, and the stupid – the former being rewarded, while the other two are punished severely.

The trial in the climax is emblematic. Larsson wants to make the legal system compensate Lisbeth for all the maltreatment she has received. The trial is completely over the top: it could very well be a Phoenix Wright case, as it is full of surprise pieces of evidence, sudden plot twists, and witnesses being arrested.

In addition, Larsson forms a whole group of good characters that is not predominantly male, putting Mikael’s sister – a women’s rights attorney – to defend Lisbeth in court, a female police officer to find out Niedermann’s whereabouts, and a female SÄPO agent to investigate the institution itself. The author puts all female characters on the side of the good guys, which, although not subtle, is consistent with the theme of the story.

The author, however, fails to justify the constant presence of some characters. The whole plot involving Mikael’s colleague, Erika Berger, is the worst offender. After Erika leaves the Millenium magazine and finds a job in one of the great newspapers in Sweden, she starts to receive several emails from an anonymous source containing sexual montages of her, as well as direct attacks calling her a “bitch”. This plotline is used to expose the issue of workplace harassment, never forgetting to point out that the security Erika hires to address the issue is a privilege available to a select few – revealing a terrifying perspective on what happens to those who don’t have the same amount of money. It is a thematically relevant plotline, but because it’s completely isolated from the main story, it becomes inconsequential and superfluous: cutting off this section would not impact Lisbeth’s story in any way.

Larsson has a serious problem in making some of his social criticisms important plot-wise. He spends a good time complaining about various spheres of Swedish society – such as the real estate market – without bothering to connect these points with the main story. He ends up filling his book with unnecessary fat, with pages and pages discussing topics that in no way influence Lisbeth’s journey:

“No, but what is new is that the construction industry is a couple of light-years ahead of all other Swedish industries when it comes to competition and efficiency. If Volvo built cars the same way, the latest model would cost about one, maybe even two million kronor. For most of the industry, cutting prices is the constant challenge. For the construction industry it’s the opposite. The price per square metre keeps going up. The state subsidizes the cost with taxpayers’ money just so that the prices aren’t prohibitive.”

This passage also makes perfectly visible the degree of exposition that usually plagues the dialogues in the book. Larsson seems to care little about subtlety: what he wants is to make sure the reader understands the subject he is criticizing. However, on several occasions such exposition is not even contextualized, resulting in highly artificial dialogues. At one point, for example, the author has one policeman explain to another how their own legal system works, which is just absurd: “This could lead to a constitutional crisis. In the United States you can cross-examine members of the government in a normal court of law. In Sweden you have to do it through a constitutional committee.”

Repetition is also a big problem in the book. There is, for example, a scene in which some people visit Zalachenko in the hospital, with an omniscient narrator describing the events. In the next chapter, the villain himself reflects on the same events, repeating everything again without any new input.

Police stupidity, so abundant in the previous book, is still present here. So, it’s not surprising that when Detectives Bublanski and Sonja discuss in detail Zalachenko’s involvement with the Swedish Secret Service and think that someone must be hindering the investigation behind the scenes, they simply cannot fathom who that person might be.

Another problem in the book is a newfound appreciation for food, as the narrator will often interrupt the action to describe the characters eating in detail: “She poured black coffee into a paper cup and ate a lettuce and cheese baguette. Then she peeled an orange and sucked each segment to extinction.”

Thematically, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest closes the trilogy perfectly – which doesn’t mean that the book doesn’t make the same mistakes seen in The Girl Who Played with Fire. With the Millenium trilogy, Stieg Larsson wrote a series of novels that, despite a good share of problems, remain relevant not only to the Swedish society but also to the whole world.

May 10, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on November 25, 2016.