The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson

I met this little number a while back for my birthday - or maybe Christmas actually hold on.... "To our dear Cait-... er I mean, To our dear Mrs Whittleby, Wishing you a very happy birthday and many happy returns, Love from Mummy and Daddy xx" Yep. Tharr be a birthday book. Mon Maman, la bibliothecaire - LIBRARIAN YOU PHILISTINE (and yes i can't work out how to do a stupid acute accent on this thing so for people out there who are SMARTY PANTSes, i am aware. shut your face.) picked this one out pour moi.

I actually quite enjoyed this book. Though let me say that I "quite enjoyed" all the other books I've reviewed so far- so let us all keep in mind that simply "liking" something has never diverted my attention from tearing the little bastard to shreds. And this simple philosophy I happily apply to all aspects of my life. Moving on.

The story starts out rather uninterestingly to be quite honest. Or rather, it is uninteresting for ME because I am only amused when a book contains explosions, sexual ambiguity (keeps me guessing) and tits. Oh yeah. Well not really I mean what heterosexual female wants to read about tits...actually I take that back. Tits it is. The tit-less reason I was uninterested by the beginning was because there they were just "ta-ta-ta-talkin' bout Blah, blah, blah" about industrial fraud. It was a concept I had no inclination to grasp at the time , only so much as to identify baddie versus goodie. Somehow the book then transitions into a completely unrelated crime drama. The main character- Somewhat Flawed Middle Aged Journalist (SFMAJ- pronounced as it's written) gets lured to a country estate by Eldery Decrepit (E-Dawg) in order to solve the mystery of his niece's death a million years ago in exchange for copious amounts of cash and sexual favours. So it then turns into a case not dissimilar to that crime show Cold Case but without the plastic surgery pin up girl detective. Instead there's an aspergery person (i think we're to assume she has an autism spectrum disorder) who goes about kickin' shit and doin' maths. Hardcore, baby. She's a hacker, so she's in the background just hackin' away. So SFMAJ starts investigating about. He looks at photos and just generally spends a lot of time lurking about, but all under the guise of writing E-Dawg's biography (he's like, a big deal) so that the family members WHO ARE ALL SUSPECTS don't find out and therefore gleefully pour their hearts out to complete strangers. Woo. So the crime takes hold and we spend the rest of the book romping about in the wilderness. Hacker has problems all of her own- she's been labelled by the government as mentally incapable or something and isn't allowed to have money or a job because then she might go on some sort of mental crime spree. Background is that she's apparently mentally unstable, but we actually get the impression that instead of being REALLY mentally unstable, she just had herself declared unfit for the fun of it. Hacker likes screwing with people, apparently. Hardcore.

Let's not kid ourselves. It isn't brilliant Dickenseque literature or anything of the sort. To be honest, it's another clever little Dan Brown. (Side note, I've only read 5/6th's of The Da Vinci Code. There weren't enough explosions or tits and everyone had a clearly defined gender role). But putting that unfortunate similarity aside, its a rollicking good time. It rambles about with the protagonist long enough to make you throw the book away in disgust, but is tricksy enough to make you want to pick it back up again. Then, the ending is both ludicrous and shockingly violent enough that the reader would never have been able to guess it. And I mean never, it's pretty ridiculous. In saying that, I do only feel that the ridiculous-ness is only part of it's charm, and there's a teensy part of me that believes that if the ending had been anything less than unbelievably outrageous, I would have been quite disappointed because I know this genre (trash-fiction, otherwise known as triction) and anything other than the standard plot line would have seen this book burning in little book hell. I didn't have to think too much about this one either. Unlike when I read The Good Earth, there are no lingering doubts in my mind about imagery or symbolism and I do not feel the need to whip out a text response.

In my own personal rating system I would give it a 9/10 for tram fiction and a 10/10 for blogging material but only a 1/10 for pretensious codswallop. There is, unfortunately, nothing pretensious here and you will, impress no one in stating that you've read this book. A black beret and a set of bongo drums would serve the purpose much better.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, MacLehose Press, Great Britain, 2008