The Girl Who Played with Fire

The first volume of the Millenium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was very successful in being both an engaging thriller and a relevant social critique of the status of women in modern society. However, its sequel, The Girl Who Played with Fire, despite keeping its social aspect intact, presents a very slow-paced narrative that never seems to know exactly which characters and threads are better to focus its attention on: instead of always following the protagonist, the story often digresses, highlighting useless points of view that never interfere in the book’s climax.

It’s Lisbeth Salander who deservedly takes the lead role here. After investigating the frauds of businessman Wennerström and becoming a millionaire, Lisbeth decides to go far away from Sweden and travel to the island of Granada in the Caribbean, where she initiates a sexual relationship with a young resident and begins to suspect the intentions of her neighbors. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist is preparing a special edition of his Millenium magazine, in which he will accuse several members of the judiciary and the police of contributing to women trafficking and participating in the sex trade that occurs illegally in his country.

The book wastes no time in revealing that it will continue to explore its predecessor’s main theme by situating the prologue in a torture chamber where a girl is being held: abuse committed against women remains the cornerstone of The Girl Who Played with Fire. As in the previous volume, Larsson doesn’t spare the reader from uncomfortable statistical data, dispensing them through exposition-heavy dialogues that go into the details of how the schemes operate, informing the salary of those involved and even the number of women used: “I have worked out that a girl can bring in an estimated 60,000 kronor a month. Of this about 15,000, say, is costs — travel, clothing, full board, etc. It’s no life of luxury; they may have to crash with a bunch of other girls in some apartment the gang provides for them. Of the remaining 45,000 kronor, the gang takes between 20,000 and 30,000. The gang leader stuffs half into his own pocket, say 15,000, and divides the rest among his employees — drivers, muscle, others. The girl gets to keep 10,000 to 12,000 kronor […] That’s about how the finances of rape look,” one of the characters explains, while the other can’t even get their head around the fact that, more often than not, the profit is even low to those involved: “It is small change. And to bring in these relatively modest sums, around a hundred girls have to be raped. It drives me mad.”

It’s the book’s main themes the reason why the story remains relevant despite its many issues. Larsson, after all, never stops attacking his society, never wasting an opportunity to construct, through the characters, precise social criticisms: in one scene, the characters will complain about budget cuts in psychiatric treatments, while in another they will make ironic comments about the competence of the police: “In its wisdom, however, the Swedish police had introduced hollow-body hunting ammunition to the police arsenal two years earlier.”

Therefore, it’s a pity that this time the author simply fails to construct an exciting narrative around these subjects. In the first book, for example, several questions were raised to capture the reader’s attention. Why did not Mikael defend himself in court? What does Wennerström hide? Who killed Harriet? These questions were not only gripping but also an integral part of the plot and the characters’ journeys.

Here, however, Lisbeth’s trip to Granada raises questions that, besides being quickly resolved, don’t interfere in the overarching story in any shape or form. The mystery about the hotel’s peculiar Americans, for example, is nothing more than a reference to one of the first book’s main themes, and the relationship between Lisbeth and her lover is also a useless distraction since the only thing it does is increase the number of pages of the novel.

When the main plotline is finally set in motion – after a few murders incriminate Lisbeth – the author divides the novel into three investigations. The first follows journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who refuses to accept the guilt of his former partner and so begins to investigate the links between what he would publish in his magazine and the recent incidents. The main problem of this part is the fact that Mikael is an apathetic character here. Often Lisbeth herself is forced to push him onto the right path, since most of the time he’s just sitting on a chair, checking the same names over and over – obviously ignoring the only ones that matter – while mulling their relationship over.

The second investigation is led by Detective Blublanski. The goal here must certainly be to infuriate the reader, as the conclusions of the police are always completely misguided by prejudice. Most of the people who work for Blublanski represent the viewpoints attacked by the book, which means that they analyze the evidence with preconceived judgments about who is to blame. When the people who know Lisbeth claim that she is not crazy and much less dumb, despite what her psychiatric profile says, the detective, instead of taking the information into consideration, gets irritated. The point here is to paint the police as a failed institution that instead of doing its job, acts as a tool of oppression. The problem is that, despite the police investigation obviously not going anywhere, it still occupies an enormous part of the novel.

Almost the same can be said about the third investigation, initiated by Lisbeth’s former employer, Dragan Armanskij. Armanskij, under the excuse of assisting the authorities, is actually trying to find out if Salander actually committed the crimes she is accused of. But this thread has no point whatsoever, with no reason to exist, since, in addition to not influencing or adding any new perspectives to the narrative, it doesn’t even reach a proper climax.

Therefore, as soon as the main plot of the book is revealed and the protagonist is incriminated, she disappears from the narrative, which prefers to follow three irrelevant investigations led by individuals unable to discover any information by themselves.

In addition to that, the narrative also falters considerably when it comes to the repetition of ideas. It is already quite tiresome to have to accompany five different characters concluding after pages and pages of reflection that they never really knew Lisbeth Salander, which means that she could very well be guilty; now, reading those same people reflecting that same thing more than once is simply ridiculous.

It is also worth noting that Larsson exaggerates so much the incompetence of the police that the reader can have a hard time believing that they can be so ignorant: during the scene in which the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian states in national television that Lisbeth “can still get well, and she would have gotten well if she had received the care she needed when she was still treatable” and then right after that says “That was because she was not receptive to treatment,” the reader will inevitably wonder if the clear inconsistency between the statements could really go unnoticed by anyone with a badge – but then again, prejudice really blinds people.

Finally, the narrative goes crazy at the climax, transforming Lisbeth Salander into an invincible superhero capable of deducing anything and overcoming any obstacle, betraying the realistic tone of the rest of the story, which is a bit jarring.

The Girl Who Played with Fire may have expanded the themes of its predecessor and have its most interesting character in the spotlight, but, with a completely uninteresting narrative, it ends up being a much lesser book than the first one.

April 19, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on July 11, 2015.