The Girl Who Played with Fire

The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

What a disappointment. My first impression of The Girl Who Played with Fire during the first few chapters was that Stieg Larsson fell in love with Lisbeth Salander while writing The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. As I got deeper into the book, I realized that the problem was more than that.

Structurally, this book was overwhelmingly heavy on exposition. After every important piece of dialogue, I knew I would read three to five paragraphs summarizing everything that I had just read. It was like being in elementary school again, where kids read a story and then read an essay explaining all of the concepts and themes from the text. The Girl Who Played with Fire is an adult book; that was unnecessary.

I’ve thought about it, and I’m fairly certain that I’ve not read a more preachy piece of fiction as an adult. Yes, the author wanted to rail against many of society’s ills, but he did so in a very overt and ineffectual way. And much of the preachiness occurs in passages that have absolutely nothing to do with anything else in the book. One example is a two-page long history of one character’s relationship with her husband. The only point of this history is to express Larsson’s view that polyamorous marriages are OK if both partners agree. There is so much that Larsson wanted to say in this book, and he made sure to get it all in. But he didn’t make sure that it all actually fit into the story. He put it all in. The novel reads like a very long newspaper article. Actually, it’s closer to a column; it is very much slanted one way. Again, that’s not bad. Just poor, poor execution.

To me, the biggest difference between this and the first novel of the trilogy is the narration from Lisbeth’s point of view. In the first novel, we read her thoughts. This time, it is almost exclusively her feelings. Huge difference, and it makes her a very different and much less compelling character. One of the intriguing things about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is the mystery of Lisbeth. Even though we don’t know everything about her in The Girl Who Played with Fire, we are very much in tune with her motivations and emotions. That eliminates much of the mystery and intrigue. It makes both her, and solving the mystery that drives the plot, much less interesting than they should be.

The characters are all over-the-top caricatures. The bad guys are bad. Always bad. In every waking moment of their lives bad. It’s so ridiculous. And the character traits that these people have. My goodness!

Whereas most of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo felt real, nothing in The Girl Who Played with Fire did. Nothing. Everything was contrived and force-fed. It is difficult for me to decide which are the most ridiculous. It could be any of Lisbeth’s action scenes. Or any of the blond giant’s scenes. In the end, I think Lisbeth herself is the most ridiculous thing about the novel. As I said to my wife, the Lisbeth that we encounter in The Girl Who Played with Fire is a cross between Ang of Avatar: The Last Airbender and Leeloo from The Fifth Element. During the final stages of the book, she became even more absurd.

That is the word that best describes the novel. The Girl Who Played with Fire was absurd.

C+