The Girl Who Played With Fire

The first volume of the Millenium 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 are better to focus on: it’s a novel that often digresses, highlighting useless points of view that never play a part in the climax.

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 and travel to the island of Granada in the Caribbean, where she initiates a sexual relationship with a young resident and begins to suspect the intentions of her neighbors. Meanwhile, Mikael Blomkvist is preparing a special edition of his Millenium magazine, in which he’ll accuse several members of the judiciary and the 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. As in the previous volume, Larsson 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 the salary of those involved and even the number of women used:

“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 those 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. Larsson, after all, 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 to capture our attention from the very start. Why did Mikael never defend himself in court? Who killed Harriet? These questions were not only gripping but also an integral part of the plot and the characters’ journeys. Here, however, Lisbeth’s trip to Granada raises questions that, besides being quickly resolved, don’t interfere with the overarching story in any 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 main themes, and the relationship between Lisbeth and her lover is also a useless distraction that serves to only 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. The main 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 is led by Detective Blublanski. The goal here is certainly to infuriate us, as the conclusions of the police are always completely misguided by prejudice. Most of the people who work for Blublanski represent the viewpoints attacked by the story, which means that they analyze the evidence with preconceived judgments about who is to blame. When the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian 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 that 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. Then, when those who know Lisbeth claim that she is not crazy and much less dumb, despite what her psychiatric profile says, Blublanski, instead of taking the information into consideration and realizing something may be wrong with the profile, simply gets annoyed at them.

The point here is to paint the police as a failed institution that instead of doing its job, acts as a tool of oppression – and honestly, is there any other valid way to paint the police? However, the issue here is that, despite this investigation obviously never going anywhere, it still occupies an enormous part of a 600-page novel.

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 actually trying to find out if Salander actually committed the crimes she is accused of. But this thread has no point whatsoever, as it fails to add any new perspectives to the story and go anywhere. It feels like filler in a book already filled with filler.

Therefore, as soon as the main plot of the book is revealed and Lisbeth is incriminated, she basically disappears from the narrative, which prefers to follow three irrelevant investigations led by individuals unable to discover any information by themselves. It’s frustrating, to say the least.

In addition to that, the narrative also falters considerably when it comes to the repetition of ideas. It is already quite tiresome 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.

Finally, the story 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 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 hampers the experience.

March 10, 2025.

Review originally published in Portuguese on July 11, 2015.