One can hardly write about Stieg Larrson’s Millenium Trilogy and the tremendously complicated anti-heroine, Lisbeth Salander, without looking in the life of its creator. The life of Larsson would not be so strange should it have jumped out of an action blockbuster with his work as a journalist and activist which saw him facing death threats every now and then because of his study into terrorist activities.
It’s been a few weeks since finishing the final book but I find myself wanting to sleep on it a bit before I put pen to paper (or my hands on the keyboard in blogging life) my thoughts on this rather twisted tale of a woman often wronged and hunted vehemently due to circumstances not of her own making (most of the time anyway). It was, thus, by chance that I saw an interview by Charlie Rose (interview at link) with Larsson’s publishers in conjunction of the final installment coming out in the US (side note: I can’t believe it took so long for it to come out Stateside.). The interview wasn’t so much about the book itself but focused more on Larsson, I am guessing because of his rather intriguing life and the drama surrounding his will after his premature death and a secret, half-finished manuscript in a hidden computer somewhere. Ironically, these are stuff that one would expect to find in a novel such as his own and not in real life.
However, for all intents and purposes, I would rather focus more on Lisbeth (and a little on Mikael Blomqvist, main male protagonist and the books as well) rather than Larsson, interesting his life might have been. I would recommend to watch that interview though (and Larsson’s Wikipedia entry too) as it was most enlightening and I reckon it does better justice to Larsson than anything that I write here.
How do one go about describing Lisbeth Salander? Bitter, brave, brilliant, cynical, paranoid, distrusting most people but loyal when one actually manages to win that trust, a misandrist with an almost psychotic need to be independent (utterly understandable of course, given her background) and deeply insecure. She’s probably one of the most complex woman characters that I’ve read in a very long time. Her character is very hard to like but so easy to empathise with as you read more and more of the books. Traumatised and victimised, every step of her childhood has been inundated with horrible treatment by male figures in her life. Her father, an ex-KGB defector who’s violent, self-serving, smart and completely devoid of a conscience, killed her mother in cold blood and ordered her half-brother to kill her and let him bury her alive. And in addition to that, her father was the catalyst to all the shit that eventually happened to her. I guess at one time or other, we all have our moments with our daddy/mummy issues but for Lisbeth, her father is the freaking mother (pun intended!) of all our teenaged emo and angsty-ness rolled into one big lifetime of disasters that had been slowly but surely heading to the green since the day Lisbeth threw a self-made milk carton bomb into her father’s face at 12. As horrified as some people might get at the thought of a 12-year-old brilliant enough to make such a bomb and battered enough to execute the plan, the circumstances of Lisbeth and her background, so painstakingly laid out over the course of the first two books and culminating into the unveiling of her childhood in the last, allowed the readers the grim satisfaction of seeing the destruction of her father (and the secretive group masterminding the sabotage of her life) and grudging understanding and respect towards the hugely broken personality of Lisbeth. Lisbeth, abused as a child by her father, mistreated by her government as a social case, mentally and sexually assaulted by her doctor and again, sexually assaulted by her case worker as a grown up, seemed to be living in a cycle of abuses by men, figures of authority that, by law and by common understanding, are supposed to be the supporter and protector of such a child and such a citizen.
It is of no surprise that she turned out to be such a hater of men and utterly paranoid and suspicious of any institution of authority, preferring rather to turn to her own devices and on very rare occasions, allowing Mikael Blomqvist to help. The most pointed example of such was how she clawed her way out of the grave her half-brother buried her into after being shot by her father and how she had, with a bullet hole at the side of her head no less, scared her mentally unstable half-brother to run away and put in a couple of shots herself into her dratted father. It is probably took something of a miracle for her to actually fall for Blomqvist in the first book. Male characters in the books, barring a very few exclusions, really do unearth the nastiest of misogynist out there in the world into the rampant path of Lisbeth.
Most, almost two-thirds, of the male characters in the series are so horribly sexist and single-minded in their hatred of the opposite sex that you would almost think that Larsson had painted an exaggerated picture that is too removed from reality, somewhat of a caricature even. But the fact is, sometimes when people are biased and prejudiced, they become so blindingly, unbelievably stupid and cruel that one could hardly believe so. Case in point, a certain Führer back in the 40s who put it his life mission to exterminate a whole race of people. But of course, in a dramatic plot, an exaggerated version of people is too often useful to establish an understanding and arouse the feeling of injustice and anger at antagonists, strengthening the readers affinity to the protagonists. And maybe, just maybe, with all the advances of feminine power in the modern times, the traditional patriarchal roots and beliefs of our society is simply not as shaken and restructured as we have thought to be and wanted to be.
I have long believed that when one writes, particularly in fictional works, there are pieces of the author or the creator of the characters that go into elements of the work. I think a lot of Larsson’s life and work have gone into his main characters, with his professional background, experiences and ideals going into shaping the character and life of Blomqvist. Something that Blomqvist said to his sister at the end of the trilogy is a blinding metaphysical presence of Larsson himself in this story when he said:
“…When it comes down to it, this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women and the men who enable it…”
This is precisely, as I would suppose, his central premise of this saga. In fact, as his publisher said in the aforementioned interview with Charlie Rose, he wanted the book to be titled Men Who Hate Women (as it is titled in the original Swedish version of the first book). His beliefs and fight against discrimination is obvious in how he started each chapter of his first book by quoting statistics and factoids about crime against women.
In the end, with Larsson’s premature death, will these three books be his final act of activism against discrimination, his legacy and culmination of his life long fight against powers that poach on the weak and the helpless? I think this would be up to the readers to determine. As for myself, I think that it is probably more prudent to take these stories as it is and let the individual take away their own meanings, regardless of all the hype that surrounds the books and the films. Many have written that Lisbeth has reshaped the mould of feminist power in the media. I think it is rather difficult to actually gauge such influences and I am reluctant to make sweeping statements about how a character like Lisbeth can reshape feminine portrayals or even the thinking of the next generation of women. It is probably as complicated as the circumstances that moulded her character.
