David LagercrantzMagnus Liam Karlsson
In November, 2004, Stieg Larsson, editor of the Swedish political magazine Expo, arrived at his office in Stockholm to find the elevator out of service. We can imagine Larsson cursing his lost time before climbing the seven flights to his desk. He was notorious for working long hours in his battle against the extreme right wing of Swedish society, and on top of it, he was fending off calls from the editor of his trilogy of crime novels, set to be published the following year.
When Larsson reached the seventh floor, he was so pale that a colleague insisted on calling an ambulance. Seconds later, he collapsed in the throes of a heart attack. He was taken to hospital, where he died within hours. He was 50 years old.
As of March, 2015, Larsson's Millennium Trilogy has sold more than 80 million copies. Now, 11 years after his death, we have The Girl in the Spider's Web. It's written by David Lagercrantz, a journalist and minor Swedish noble, whose biography makes him sound like a guy Larsson wouldn't have liked much. The book promises more adventures with the series' two magnetic protagonists: Mikael Blomkvist, the James Bond of crusading journalism and open-faced sandwiches; and Lisbeth Salander, anti-social super-hacker, vigilante feminist and master of the art of creative tasering.
There is controversy surrounding the novel's publication. Larsson's long-time partner, Eva Gabrielsson, calls it a cash grab by Larsson's family and publisher, and accuses Lagercrantz of being a hack piggybacking on his predecessor's literary mojo. She inherited Larsson's draft of a planned fourth book, but says he never would have wanted it published.
For fans of the series, it provides an opportunity to revisit a big question: why was the Millennium Trilogy so hugely popular? Sure, it was an engrossing crime story, but a lot about it flaunted the would-be rules of the novelist's craft. Larsson's prose is painfully expository and packed with the driest of details. The novels feature dense accounts of Swedish political history, rants about financial journalism and endless scenes in which the characters drink coffee at midnight or ingest food without pleasure. The violence is ample, visceral and hard to swallow.
Yet, for all of their idiosyncrasies, there's something breathless about the books, which exerts an almost physical pull through the text. Larsson is said to have written them quickly, late at night, and no matter how many laptop specs, Swedish street names or billions of kronor he throws at us, the prose retains that much-sought quality that makes people stay up until dawn, reading.
The most obvious source of the books' appeal, however, is Salander and Blomkvist. Read the whole trilogy and you will likely spend time fantasizing about being both, for different reasons. Salander is a damaged genius, the misfit inside us all; Blomkvist is a charming devil with a conscience of steel and irresistible pheromones.
There are precedents for resurrecting popular characters after their authors' demise. James Bond is the most high-profile case. Since Ian Fleming's death in 1964, nine different authors have picked up the martini glass to continue the story of the world's favourite superspy. Like Bond, Blomkvist and especially Salander have become part of the zeitgeist, featured in three Swedish films and one Hollywood adaptation directed by David Fincher.
The question is, can Lagercrantz conjure the soul of these characters we've come to love so much?
Alas, the answer is not really. From the start, The Girl in the Spider's Web feels off. We are introduced to Frans Balder, a self-described lousy father come to collect his autistic son, August, from his equally lousy mother and stepfather. In time, we find out that Balder is a computer genius, working on a top secret artificial intelligence project. In more time, he and August become the central nodes in a plot that mashes together the NSA, surveillance culture, Russian gangsters, the Marvel Universe, Oliver Sacks and, eventually, the continuing story of Salander's tragic upbringing.
The problems are numerous. Larsson was skilled at making complexity serve his story. Here, the plot quickly becomes knotty and uninteresting. Although many of the characters from the original trilogy are back, there are far too many new ones, few of whom Lagercrantz makes us care about. (He does add some interesting depth to Inspector Jan Bublanski.) The language is often sloppy, lacking Larsson's precision, rigour and fire. In short, Lagercrantz is unable to capture the peculiar thrill – one might call it Stiegness – that made the original books so readable.
This, however, is not his central crime. The ostensible reason for this book to exist is to give us more Blomkvist and Salander. It's understandable for Lagercrantz to try to tell the story in his own voice – but not at all to meddle with the story's brain or its heart. His version of Blomkvist is disappointing, if plausible: The book is set years after the events of Larsson's final book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, with Blomkvist being mocked on social media as a has-been. It's mildly heartbreaking that he doesn't eat a single sandwich throughout the book and feels much more disheveleld and frumpy than his blueprint, but we get plenty of him.
The same cannot be said for Salander. Larsson teased us with bits of her story, using them sparingly but with skill, to draw us through the narrative. In The Girl in the Spider's Web – which weighs in at a relatively slight 400 pages – she does not appear until after page 50. And then, she is Salander, but not: She says and does things that feel inconsistent with the character we know. She is more cruel yet more self-aware, less anarchist savant and more snarky action hero. In one particularly jarring instance, she calls Blomkvist a "smartarse."
Larsson's books were explicitly about violence against women, and in Salander, he created an incendiary yet vulnerable vehicle for the rage he felt at this branch of social injustice. Crucially, he also loved her – and taught us to love her, too. Lagercrantz has tried to do his own thing with her story, tackling issues ripped from today's headlines. In the end, though, it's hard to shake the feeling that he shares a common trait with Larsson's worst villains: He doesn't seem to like Salander much. Although it's nothing new to see Lisbeth Salander get a raw deal, in this instance, it is particularly sad. Stieg Larsson, her inventor, friend and most ardent flame, always wanted better for her.
J.R. McConvey is a Toronto writer.