The continuation of the Millennium series is a literary event of some moment, since it continues the career of Lisbeth Salander, one of the very special characters to emerge in the second golden age of crime fiction. Each of the three books in Stieg Larsson’s series is written in a different subgenre (locked-room [island] mystery, legal thriller, etc.). The Girl in the Spider’s Web is a technothriller. A genius studying artificial intelligence is murdered. His death is connected with an international plot between an American government agency and a private firm to profit from the acquisition of industrial secrets. Enter the Russian mob, the principal Swedish security agency, local investigators, Mikael Blomkvist, Lisbeth Salander and Lisbeth’s evil twin sister, Camilla. The last element takes us deeper and deeper into Lisbeth’s backstory and, in the process, adds a touch of the biblical/mythic. A further delineation of Lisbeth’s character comes when she finds herself in the position of guarding/mothering a young, autistic savant, the son of the murdered Swedish AI specialist. This is a very clever way of getting us into the brilliant, quirky mind of LS.
Issues: the technothriller focusing on the nuances of computation, encryption and hacking entails risk. How do you make the story interesting enough to delight the digital generation without making it so complex that it results in tedium for others? The world of quantum computers and the factorization of prime numbers is fascinating, but a little of it goes a long way. There is also the question of pace. LS is such a fascinating character that I can understand the decision to keep her in abeyance as the plot develops. This helps build both suspense and anticipation and we are anxious to see her appear on the scene and electrify it by her very presence. She does not really appear in the novel until we are 50 pp. in. On the other hand, the conclusion is superb and she is well worth waiting for. Finally, there is the issue of atmospherics. The literal atmospherics—icy winds, swirling snow, chilled bones—are easy enough and they are done well, but how does one convey the ethos of Stockholm, etc. for those who have never been there or who know it very superficially? Lagercrantz’s technique is to enumerate every street for every character, every café, every corporate office, every encounter and every memory. Ultimately this seems to work, even though the reader may not have anything approaching a mental image of the street being described. It creates a sort of rhythm, like the names in apposition in Homeric epic (Achilles, breaker of horses, etc.), but it points up the difficulty of presenting a story set in a relatively small and relatively isolated place to a vast, international audience.
Lagercrantz’s narrative is effective and polished (to the extent that I can judge it); the translation by George Goulding is certainly smooth and does not draw unnecessary attention to itself. The ‘English’ is international and does not succumb to the temptation to rely on awkward British or American idiomatic expressions.
Finally, I enjoyed the novel very much. The new author makes excellent use of a brilliant set of core characters and is able to handle the technical details of the novel’s principal plot arcs with skill and authority. While it does not quite achieve the effects of Larsson’s work, that might be in part because Larsson entered the crime fiction scene with such drama and panache that Lagercrantz was forced to meet impossible expectations. The bottom line is that I would purchase the next novel in the series and look forward to reading it.
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"What A Long Journey This Has Been"
Having inhaled the original trilogy by Steig Larrson (in fact my dear friend sent me the final novel from England almost one year before it was released in USA and I danced with joy when DHL knocked on my door that Xmas) this 4th addition is utterly a boring and slow read. Sorry, but it pains me to say this. It's all so obvious-the few chases, the long lost twin sister, the computer technology...not one surprise! We have the two lead characters so well established and "loved" by all, so the choice of plot and the pacing of this pasted together novel is bewildering. Whoever "planned" the marketing of the 4th installment simply played it SAFE. They should have listened to the partner of Steig Larrson and not the father/brother. But that has all been chronicled. Finally I think the it would have been a far better novel to have gone OUTSIDE THE BOX and brought in a hot young crime/thriller writer from England? The Brits do this really well. Being Swedish is no longer a pre-requisite for writing any future sequel. As I stated earlier the two extraordianary lead characters are so well drawn and loved by readers all over the world...just find a great plot to drop them in and take some chances!
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- Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2015
- Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2015
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- MarlowReviewed in Italy on July 16, 2019
Very good proceeding of Larsson’s trilogy
