THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE - Stieg Larsson - Fiction

Last time I reviewed THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, the first installment in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, I was unsure whether the series would live up to the hopes of its author, as a feminist and female-forward (if such a term exists) mystery. Its heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is certainly problematic, and I was ambivalent in the truest sense of the word about her relationship with Mikael Blomkvist, journalist and do-gooder and seemingly infallible man. Luckily, the second volume doesn't reprise their relationship; Lisbeth moves in with her lesbian lover Mimmi, and is on the lam for most of the novel. It does, however, deepen my concern and confusion about the book's feminism, and what it means to be a feminist mystery novel.

After reading an illuminating discussion with YA author Maggie Stiefvater about what makes a strong heroine, I'm even more troubled by Lisbeth. Already, in the first book, we know that Lisbeth is skinny, short, and boyish. She is often mistaken for a child of twelve. She is quite possibly a psychopath, with strong emotional reactions and an aversion to authority and the police; she does not make friends easily, and is very blunt. In this novel, we are frequently told that Lisbeth is "moral" but has "her own morals" and that these sometimes deviate from the norm. Lisbeth herself deviates from the norm in her choices of sexual partners, body modifications, and style of dress. Thankfully, these are not portrayed as negative choices, but are clearly and repeatedly "othered" and marked as different. Throughout the narrative focusing on the police manhunt for Salander, her and Mimmi's sexual proclivities are focused on to an offensive extent by the local police. Luckily, this fixation is portrayed in a negative and salacious light, and all of the heroes trust that Salander is innocent or the victim of circumstances, and will be cleared once more facts come to light.

Salander is not a particularly good role model. Her distrust of authority forces her to take matters into her own hands, sometimes dangerously. She fails to inform others of her plans even when they put her life at risk. She takes stupid chances. She resorts to physical violence frequently. She never shows fear, even when it would do her good. She steals. She burns bridges like a pyromaniac. She is so powerfully offended by mistreatment that she would rather dig herself deeper into terrible situations than lose some of her pride by cooperating. She is not a particularly caring romantic partner. She doesn't understand the concept of job security, and only holds on to her jobs because her employers are fond of her, or intrigued by her oddness. She betrays her friends' trust, and like every cliche of a jilted woman, reads her ex-lover's email.

This is not to say that Salander is not a "real" character or not deserving of respect; she is powerfully intelligent and talented, superhumanly strong, and fairly adept at intuition. (Sometimes the powers attributed to her are downright supernatural: when chased by a man easily three times her size, Salander escapes him by dropping to the curb, rolling underneath a parked sedan, and coming up on the other side in a fighting stance, in a matter of seconds. Go outside and look at any Toyota parked by the side of the road, and tell me how it is remotely possible for a human being to execute a barrel roll under the chassis of a car and come out the other side in seconds, ready to tussle.) Salander's emotional difficulties don't make her less of a feminist heroine, or less believable as a woman. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE gets some negatives for giving Salander breast implants and fixating on them, implying that they make her feel like a woman in some fundamental way she lacked without them, but the novel gets positives for the initial chapters, in which Salander spends her time on the beach reading complex mathematical texts and making forays into Fermat's last theorem (already solved, of course, but Lisbeth doesn't want to cheat and look at the answer.) In fact the first two chapters are quite interesting and neat; Salander is vacation on an island hit by a hurricane, which gives her the opportunity to rescue her younger native-islander lover and save a vacationing woman from her husband's murderous impulses; the husband dies, being swept away by the storm, and Salander manages to be an unobtrusive hero, while she ponders her math and lives off of her stolen fortune. Inexplicably, these plot points are completely dropped for the rest of the novel; we never hear more about the woman Salander saves or her new love interest, and next we see her, she has returned to Sweden.

Of course, she needs to be in Sweden if she's going to get wrapped up in Mikael Blomkvist's latest journalistic endeavors, because once again, the series seems to be told from the tunnel-vision of Blomkvist's world. Salander plays a major role in the events that unfold, but these events are motivated by Mikael's muck-raking instincts. A brief mention of the Berger-Blomkvist-Salander love triangle: one of the most awkward elements of the novel is the lack of communication between Mikael and Erika. For two people who have been lovers for most of their lives, and refuse to compromise their relationship for nearly anything, they do not talk. Mikael won't tell Erika about his lingering feelings for Lisbeth, Erika won't tell Mikael about her job offer at a rival newspaper, which she intends to take, and they certainly aren't going to talk about their relationship, and what the continuous interruptions of Lisbeth Salander mean for its longevity. It seems obvious that Mikael's pet project is becoming more of a live-in obsession, but this rift between Mikael and Erika is left to rub awkwardly against the plot-line whenever the two come into the same scene.

Here's the thing: Salander is great to root for. She is nearly infallible (only succumbing at the end to overwhelming emotion, which makes her forget her training as a security systems analyst, and wander right into a fairly obvious surveillance trap, and the wrong end of her father's gun.) Sure, it's a bit sticky at the end, with Salander being tortured and shot by her father, who badly abused her mother, leaving her brain-damaged; it's also awkward that the primary villain we see throughout turns out to be Salander's half-brother, a man as immune to pain as Salander herself is to fear. It is even more awkward that Mimmi is abducted by this man, and has to be rescued by a boxer ex machina, inexplicably defeating by force the very man who cannot feel pain--isn't there a more clever way to deal with such a monster than a kick to the nuts?--but nevertheless, the plot is exciting, Lisbeth's derring-do is exhilarating, and it's somewhat refreshing to see a female main character who insists on going it on her own, without help from even the most obvious sources.

Yet, there's something troubling about the way in which Lisbeth's strength is uniformly defined in terms of masculine definitions of "strong." Lisbeth is a physical powerhouse, despite being small and, well, boyish. She's a computer whiz who's bad at feelings and bad at romantic relationships. She loves fast motorcycles and tropical islands. She's a female James Bond, without any of Daniel Craig's remorse. And sure, there's a part of me that loves to see that, to see a woman kicking ass--but let's draw the obvious comparison, with Trinity from the Matrix. Trinity was a motorcycle-revving ass-kicker in tight black leather and a punk sensibility. She was technologically adept. And yet, she was even more powerful because she was afraid, afraid that Neo wouldn't be the one, that the ship wouldn't survive its squidlet attack--but she tried anyway. She believed in her shipmates and honestly loved them, mourned their deaths and threw herself behind the long odds on their quest. Salander wouldn't have been on the Nebuchadnezzar because she can't get along with people, and if someone told her she wasn't the One, there's no way she would have self-sacrificed for some other One. Somehow, this seems like a problem.

There's also something a little over-the-top about the way that Salander's past, and her entanglement with the Swedish medico-legal system toys with her psyche and allows her disenfranchisement to fuel the entire storyline. We're led to believe that Salander hates men who hates women, and so would have fallen afoul of the traffickers and hit-men targeted in Millennium's expose, but really, she has personal reasons for all of her grudges, and makes new ones throughout her murder-suspect ordeal. She hates the traffickers because they are run by her father. She hates the police and the psychiatrists because they were paid off by associates of her father to keep her in custody so she couldn't reveal anyone's identity. Any sense of problems larger than herself, social injustices, or connections with other women are simply absent--and that's what keeps me from labeling Lisbeth Salander a feminist heroine.