Book Review: The girl in a complicated plot

David Lagercrantz's continuation of Steig Larsson's trilogy fails to match the original

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB
Author: David Lagercrantz
Publisher: Hachette India
Pages: 432
Price: Rs 599

One typhoid-ridden afternoon a few years ago, I decided to finally read the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for some comfort reading. It didn’t stop at one book, though — I read the entire Millennium Trilogy in the next six days. Stieg Larsson’s books made for great company to a fever-clouded mind, and it made sense to be reading about a protagonist who is a journalist just a week before I was to start my career as one. It was with similar expectations that I picked up David Lagercrantz’s The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Much to my disappointment though, the book does nothing to take forward Larsson’s legacy.

The book opens on a promising note, reintroducing characters from the Millennium Trilogy that Larsson so meticulously developed. While the first book was much more exciting than the two that followed, there was a certain unity in the manner in which the plot progressed. Most of those who saw me read the first book warned me not to read the other two. But I like to see the plot move forward. I did, in fact, torture myself to read the entire 50 Shades of Grey trilogy just to see what shape it takes. Plus, after the first book, the die-hard romantic in me wanted to give Mikael Blomkvist, the star reporter of Millennuim magazine, and Lisbeth Salander, super-hacker and private investigator, to have another chance at love.

Though unrealistic and a little too favourable towards Blomkvist — Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon comes to mind — the books did manage to hold my attention despite a complicated plot. Lagercrantz’s fourth in the series does nothing of the sort. The plot — complete with new age hacking jargon — is complicated and uses medias res a tad too excessively. A character introduced in the first half of an all too lengthy novel appears with only his last name in the final chapter, making me wonder if this is someone new. And finding a new character towards the end isn’t too improbable either — Lagercrantz introduces us to new facets of an already convoluted plot by infusing a new character every now and then, including in the last 100 pages of the book. What is also irritating is the fact that the author, through his character, keeps trying to explain the plot. It may be important to acquaint the reader with old characters, but surely, not quite as much. The language is nothing to write home. I wonder if a poor English translation of the original Swedish novel is responsible for this.

What is also missing is the Blomkvist-Lisbeth chemistry, both characters are watered down in this book. Lisbeth’s edginess exists, but only in parts and not remotely as visual as in Larsson’s original. To give Lagercrantz credit, he shines when he works with characters of his own creation — the Balder family, for example. But I do have a bone to pick with the author on why he keeps calling August Balder, the young autistic savant, “the autistic boy”. He also relies heavily on a black-and-white perspective of the Salander twins. Larsson’s portrayal of the Salander family was nuanced, while Lagercrantz depicts Camilla Salander simply as Lisbeth’s “evil twin”. As I trudge through the final chapter of the novel, I come to a horrifying realisation — there are enough loose-ends to suggest that there could be another sequel that, for my own obsessive-compulsive disorder of reading all books in a series, will have to be read.