The Girl Who Played with Fire

Two months ago in my Girl with the Dragon Tattoo post, I neglected to mention an issue with the book that many people found to be its biggest flaw. It started pretty slowly, and to a lesser extent its ending dragged on a bit. The bulk of the story was told after the first hundred-plus pages, and the major conflicts most readers were invested in had wrapped themselves up before the final sixty or so, which dealt with bringing closure to the story's original conflict, a conflict which had been pushed to the backburner for the bulk of the book. I didn't bring this up then because the issue didn't really bother me. I really enjoyed that the book got exciting fast after a lengthy introduction that had established our characters, and I felt that the book had "earned" the right to take its time winding down after coming to a natural climax (or two) with a hundred pages to go. The reason I bring this up now is because I perceived this book to have an exactly opposite "excitement vs. time" curve. It began with a bang, putting the series' titular inked pyromaniac on a Caribbean island with a hurricane coming and a domestic dispute brewing. Action and excitement were had in large doses, then, before the book reached its hundredth page. Once it did, this isolated tropical adventure was never re-visited, and instead another lengthy build-up toward a murder mystery happened. Still, it took until about the two-hundredth page for the murders to actually happen. The middle hundred pages dragged at an incredibly slow rate; Rooney Mara leaves the narrative entirely while several other characters ever-so-slowly begin to investigate these murders, declaring our "woman-hating-man"-hating-woman the prime suspect. Things began to pick up a little bit in the pages numbered in the 400s as we finally return to our lady protagonist's point of view and start to see some serious shit go down. And then the final hundred pages manage to piece everything together - including a few big twists that reveal some shared character histories - before the series nearly jumps the shark by having someone get shot in the head, then get buried alive, and then survive the whole thing right as the book ends abruptly. So I was entertained at first, then kind of bored and apathetic toward the story for a month and a half (although it probably didn't help that I was reading the early part of the book on a series of trips, bringing it with me to Connecticut, Vermont, Quebec, Virginia, and Maine), and then able to rip through the second half of the book in a matter of days. I'm left kind of torn. The Girl Who Played with Fire was an exciting and enjoyable book. It took a more-than-superficial look at a few big socio-sexual issues in the Western World today. It continued to develop an already interesting character. It told an intriguing murder mystery. But I'm not sure if it was a better novel than its predecessor, which I wasn't even sure was an excellent novel in the first place. I feel like a great big asshole, complaining about popular and beloved video games and books today, but I'm just trying to call it like I felt it, and in the case of this Millennium Trilogy so far, I'm not feeling the things enough other people felt to make the books into international best-sellers and lucrative movies. Of course, having said all that, I must again acknowledge, so as not to give off the wrong overall message here, that I really have enjoyed both books so far (in addition to the first film in the newer, American trilogy). I just don't see why these are world-wide sensations, I guess. Of course, the jury's still out, and I imagine I'll read the third and final book within the coming weeks, so my overall opinion could shift one way or the other. For now though, I'd say the first book was a break-out hit, easy to read and hard to put down, and something that told a nice, contained stand-alone story, while the second book was a bit more over-the-top than the first, sometimes in good ways and sometimes in not-so-good ways, and that it didn't tell a stand-alone story at all since it ends on a huge cliffhanger that makes me want to jump right into... Wait... No... This has happened to me before. And when it did, the third book wasn't any good at all. And now I'm seeing visual parallels that I don't think I will ever un-see:

And now I have no faith - none at all - that this third book will be worth its weight in fecal matter. Oh well. At least the bar's been set low! (By Mockingjay. Not by the previous two books in this trilogy. We've been over this extensively already.)