Life in Italics

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and I hastily tore into the next book in the series, The Girl Who Played with Fire. I’ll be honest I was a couple hundred pages into the book when I strongly considered putting the book down and giving up on the series as a whole. In Dragon Tattoo, as I said in my review, there are some areas of the book that get dicey as far as language goes. There’s also some sexual activity, but in Dragon Tattoo, the activity is very clearly a part of the overall plot (if you’ve read it already, you  know exactly what I mean).

However, Fire wanders aimlessly through sexual exploits that, even with the benefit of hindsight, are not at all related to the plot. Honestly, I probably should have put the book down at that point, simply because it was in such direct opposition to the way that I approach the world. However, whether rightly or wrongly, I kept reading through the book. I’d like to say that I’m glad I did, but I’m not 100% sure that would be true. I will say this, once the story actually picked up, the plot was riveting.

The mystery in Fire is much stronger and much deeper than the one presented in Dragon Tattoo. Fire sucks several of the main characters personally and emotionally into a story that feels much more organic and relatable than Dragon Tattoo (whose locked-room mystery was great but the protagonists were interlopers in the mystery, not direct participants). Fire also plays with a mystery-within-a-mystery storytelling device that left me feeling like I was stumbling behind Hansel and Gretel (where the heck do all these bread crumbs lead?!?!). Once  you get past Larsson’s sex-capade of the first 100-200, the story is fast-paced, unpredictable and very entertaining.

And yet, I can’t help but wonder why Larsson spent so much of the beginning of Fire seemingly obsessing over details of the sex life of the characters. It’s not as if he simply states that two characters have sex, he describes intimate moments in a level of detail that, as I stated before, walked right over the line of comfortable reading (for me at least). I suppose you can be critical of me for basing my enjoyment of a book on whether it lives up to some ambiguous moral standard I have for authors and the stories they write, but it definitely put a cap on how much I felt like I could like the book. Here’s hoping that the third book, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest somehow creates plot points from the promiscuous portions of Fire. I won’t hesitate to simply stop reading the next installment if it wanders through those waters again.

Tags: crime, irritating, mystery, not recommended, novel