The Girl Who Played With Fire

The first volume of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was very successful in being both an engaging thriller and a relevant social critique of the status of women in modern society. The Girl Who Played with Fire, however, despite keeping the social aspect intact, presents a very slow-paced narrative that doesn’t know which characters and threads to follow: it’s a novel structured much akin to my mind, which often digresses, highlighting useless points instead of focusing on what’s important at the moment.

It’s Lisbeth Salander who deservedly takes the lead role here – for a while, at least. After becoming a millionaire, Lisbeth decides to go far away from Sweden to the island of Granada in the Caribbean, where she starts a sexual relationship with a young resident but begins to suspect the intentions of her neighbors. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist is preparing a special edition of his Millennium magazine, in which he’ll accuse several members of the judiciary and police of contributing to women trafficking in his country.

The book wastes no time in revealing that it will continue to explore its predecessor’s main theme by situating the prologue in a torture chamber where a girl is being held: abuse committed against women remains the cornerstone of The Girl Who Played with Fire, which doesn’t spare us from uncomfortable statistical data, dispensing them through exposition-heavy dialogues that go into the granular details of how these schemes operate, informing even the salary of those involved and the number of women exploited:

“I have worked out that a girl can bring in an estimated 60,000 kronor a month. Of this about 15,000, say, is costs — travel, clothing, full board, etc. It’s no life of luxury; they may have to crash with a bunch of other girls in some apartment the gang provides for them. Of the remaining 45,000 kronor, the gang takes between 20,000 and 30,000. The gang leader stuffs half into his own pocket, say 15,000, and divides the rest among his employees — drivers, muscle, others. The girl gets to keep 10,000 to 12,000 kronor […] That’s about how the finances of rape look,” one of the characters explains, while the other can’t even get their head around the fact that, more often than not, the profit is even low to criminals involved: “It is small change. And to bring in these relatively modest sums, around a hundred girls have to be raped. It drives me mad.”

It’s the book’s main themes the reason why the story remains relevant despite its many issues. After all, it never stops exposing the problems of Swedish society: in one scene, characters complain about budget cuts in psychiatric treatments, while in another, they make ironic comments about the competence of the police: “In its wisdom, however, the Swedish police had introduced hollow-body hunting ammunition to the police arsenal two years earlier.”

Therefore, it’s a pity that this time there’s not an exciting narrative surrounding these discussions. In the first book, for example, several questions were raised very early on to capture our attention from the very start. Why did Mikael never defend himself in court? Who killed Harriet? Is his employer hiding something from him? These mysteries were not only gripping but also an integral part of the plot and the characters’ journeys. Here, however, Lisbeth’s trip to Granada doesn’t interfere with the overarching story in any way, shape, or form. The mystery about her hotel’s peculiar Americans, for example, is nothing more than a reference to one of the first book’s themes, and the relationship between Lisbeth and her lover is another distraction that serves only to increase the number of pages.

When the main plotline is finally set in motion – after a couple of murders incriminate Lisbeth – the narrative is split into three investigations. The first follows Mikael Blomkvist, who refuses to accept the guilt of his former partner and so begins to investigate the murders by himself. But the problem here is that Mikael is now an apathetic character. Lisbeth herself is often forced to push him onto the right path, since most of the time he’s just sitting on a chair, checking the same names over and over again – while obviously ignoring the only ones that matter – and mulling over their relationship.

The second investigation, led by Detective Bublanski, is meant to infuriate us, as the police’s conclusions are always completely contaminated by prejudice. Most of the people who work for Bublanski represent the viewpoints attacked by the story, as they analyze the evidence with preconceived judgments about who is to blame. When the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian, for example, states in national television that Lisbeth “can still get well, and she would have gotten well if she had received the care she needed when she was still treatable” and then right after says, “That was because she was not receptive to treatment,” the police never catches the blatant contradiction because the statements are on par with the course.  They already blame her, so they don’t care. They’re not really paying attention.

This is why the moment those close to Lisbeth go to Bublanski and claim that she is not crazy and much less dumb, the detective never takes the information seriously and suspects there’s something wrong with her psychiatric profile. Bublanski simply gets annoyed at them for trying to complicate things. The point, of course, is to paint the police as a failed institution that, instead of doing its job, acts only as a tool of oppression – and honestly, is there any other valid way to paint the police? But the problem here is that, despite this investigation obviously never going anywhere, it still occupies an enormous part of a 600-page novel. It’s tiresome.

And to make matters worse, the third investigation, initiated by Lisbeth’s former employer, Dragan Armansky, suffers from similar problems. Armansky, under the excuse of assisting the authorities, is trying to find out for himself if Salander really committed the crimes she is accused of. But this plotline has no point whatsoever, as it fails to add any new perspectives to the story and, much like Bublanski’s investigation, never goes anywhere. It feels like filler in a book already filled with filler.

Therefore, as soon as the main plot is revealed and Lisbeth is incriminated, she basically disappears from the book, which prefers to follow three irrelevant investigations led by individuals unable to discover any information by themselves. I almost said that this is incredibly frustrating, but being around me is incredibly frustrating; this is on another level altogether. This is something else.

And the book can be quite repetitive, too. It’s already quite wearisome to have to accompany five different characters concluding after pages and pages of reflection that they never really “knew” Lisbeth Salander, and so she could very well be guilty. Now, reading those same five people reflecting on that same thing more than once is simply ridiculous. Shoot me, please.

Finally, the book simply goes crazy at the climax, transforming Lisbeth Salander into an invincible superhero capable of deducing anything and overcoming any obstacle, betraying the grounded, realistic tone of the rest of the story, which can be a bit, well, jarring.

The Girl Who Played With Fire may have expanded the themes of its predecessor and put its most interesting character under the spotlight, but its frustrating structure and unfocused narrative more than hamper the experience.

March 10, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on July 11, 2015.