Much as I love Nordic crime fiction, the Europewide megaseller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson made me want to throw knives like the Swedish chef on The Muppet Show. Why?
Two reasons.
First, the minor reason. Written by a (tragically deceased) Swedish journalist, the book is entirely in the style of a magazine article. Complete with page after page of “research.” It’d be enough for the author to tell me that Swedish women are often assaulted by men. I don’t need five pages of real background. A writer ought to understand that the greater the temptation for the reader to skim, the worse the book is. You end up with a good 250 page mystery trapped inside a 600 page monster.
Overloading with journalistic background is a common technique in contemporary thrillers and mysteries. It’s as though making things up was somehow a distortion of reality. Whereas it actually gets you a lot closer to reality than journalism or journalistic techniques, because it opens up the reader emotionally. (That’s what I’ve found with my Palestinian detective series.)
Second, the major reason. The Internet.
In “Dragon Tattoo,” the eponymous heroine is the now generic thriller/mystery character: the Internet hacker genius. Whenever Larsson needs to inject some new information or to unravel a tricky plot point, his hacker opens up her laptop and links into www.secretgovernmentinformation.com, the well-known (to fiction writers) site where all governments, in particular their intelligence networks, store material they want to be sure is available only to fictional hacker geniuses (and by proxy to thriller writers).
“Dragon Tattoo” isn’t the worst offender. Just the biggest seller.
But I’m only naming names here because poor old Larsson is dead. Those (here unnamed) living writers who use this technique ought to be ashamed of themselves.
In my novels the only time the Internet comes up is when detective Omar Yussef’s granddaughter sets up a website for him in her attempt to make him seem more professional. “The Palestine Agency for Detection,” as she calls her site, is merely embarrassing to Omar. No plot-point-shifting Houdini act there.
The Internet has essentially taken over from the Mossad as the thriller writer’s cure-all. In the old days, if there was something your main character couldn’t figure out, all he had to do was get in touch with the nearest Mossad agent, who’d be sure to know all the secrets in the world and was happy to pass them on with a few dark words about never forgetting the Holocaust and a cheerful “Shalom.”
As a resident of Israel, I can tell you the Mossad doesn’t operate that way. Neither does the Internet.
So stop writing books that pretend it does. (I wonder how you say that in Swedish...)
Thursday, June 18, 2009
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8 comments:
You are my hero! This mega-selling book is flawed on so many levels and I talked about it back in January 2008!
http://josephinedamian.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-i-stopped-reading-this-book_17.html
Its success is just more proof that sometimes a writers's greatest career move is an untimely death.
I, too, would've stopped at page 49, but I decided to press on purely because I wanted to see how Larsson developed the plot. It turned out to be less half-assed than The DaVinci Code plot (another book I read more or less for professional reasons, rather than enjoyment). But the main reason was that I was in the airport at Paris for a late flight and the bookshop had closed and.... so there I was.
Nice one. The two biggest flaws with this vastly overrated book identified and succinctly documented. I'm glad I'm not the only one who waded throught the first 150 pages of info dumps about family trees, finance etc. It was bloody hard work
...hard work and not so edifying. "Info dump" is a great phrase for it.
I was a Larsson doubter as well Dragon Tattoo was a turgid effort, definitely a journalists first effort at writing a novel.
But I stuck with it not really enjoying the experience. I then had some discussions with the translator Steven Murray aka Reg Keeland and was persuaded to read number two Played with Fire and found it to be an infinitely better book.
I became a convert.
Lisbeth Salander is such an exceptional character that we have to forgive the lack of an editor and the extra details about RAM and other nonsense in the first book.
I have discussed some of the ballyhoo around the Larsson phenomenon at:
http://camberwell-crime.blogspot.com/2009/01/who-is-lisbeth-salander.html
and here
http://camberwell-crime.blogspot.com/2008/11/stieg-larsson-debate_17.html
and here
http://camberwell-crime.blogspot.com/2008/11/heightened-anticipation-stieg-larsson.html
and here:
http://camberwell-crime.blogspot.com/2009/01/larsson-on-fire-girl-who-played-with.html
Just do a Stieg Larsson search. ;o) Shalom.
Salandar is a great character, no question. Unfortunately, Matt's point about journalistic excess is spot on, as are the Internet comments. I was also taken away from the story by the extreme convenience of how the journalist's daughter uncovers the first major clue in the cabin, and the convenience of the killer's death. Larsson had a knack for dragging out information that should have been summarized or left out, and summarizing information that might have made a great scene. There were probably two books worth of story in there, and both could have been told more effectively in about 200 fewer pages.
I've refrained from reading this post until now because I was reading the book myself.
While I agree with your main points (Internet as Deus ex Machina, c'mon!), I kept on and ultimately found it to be a satisfying story (review). More, I found myself wondering what Lisbeth will be like in the second book. I'm #74 on the waiting list at my library once it's received.
I agree, Linkmeister, that the story is quite well constructed. But I found it to be buried beneath all the backstory. In some ways, I think Larsson was trying to write a book that'd have tremendous impact on Swedes (I have the sense that a lot of the secondary characters, businessmen, politicians, etc. will be recognizable to Swedes as people in their public life). In that sense, he succeeded, because I seem to recall about one in four Swedes has bought the book. Then the thing took off and went international. At which point editors ought to have reconfigured it for people who'd find no resonance in much of the backstory... I hope you're enjoying the second book. I've heard it's better...
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