Clara’s Verdict
Some crime novels open with a body. This audiobook opens instead with a disgraced financial journalist, a disappearance that is already forty years old, and a family that would very much rather not be asked about it. Eighteen hours and forty-eight minutes is what The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo takes to do its work, and by the account of two of the three reviewers here it is slow before it is anything else.
Saul Reichlin is credited with the reading, and I will come shortly to what this material asks of a narrator, and to the fact that nobody in the review pool says a word about how it was met. Most of my reservations belong to the novel rather than to the reader, and they are the ones the reviews raise themselves: this is a book that divides people, and the division is not really about quality.
Lisbeth Salander is the reason most people arrive here, and the copy hands her over in a single phrase: “the tattooed, truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander”. One reviewer improves on that, calling her “a modern and arresting (anti)heroine”, and the emphasis belongs on the parenthesis. She is not a heroine who has been softened for you.
About the Audiobook
Harriet Vanger vanished four decades ago during a family gathering, held on an island that her own relatives, the powerful Vanger clan, both own and inhabit. Her body never turned up. Her uncle has spent the years since certain that she was murdered, and certain the murderer sits somewhere inside a family the copy describes as “tightly knit but dysfunctional”. He employs two investigators: Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist in disgrace, and Lisbeth Salander, a hacker. What begins as a cold-case commission opens out into a series of grotesque murders from four decades earlier and, from there, into “a dark and appalling family history”.
Chronologically and in every other sense, this is where the Millennium sequence begins, and it is the only sensible place to start, since this is the volume in which the uncle puts Blomkvist and Salander together in the first place. The publisher’s copy notes that the trilogy is continued in The Girl in the Spider’s Web and The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz, so a completist has two distinct stages ahead: Stieg Larsson’s own three books first, then the continuation novels credited to another writer.
MacLehose Press is named as publisher, the recording carries a 2009 production credit to WF Howes, and the edition is dated 07 May 2009. The running time is a substantial commitment rather than a punishing one, and a cold-case structure of this kind offers a listener natural places to stop.
The Narration
Here is the limitation, stated first. Not one of the three reviews attached here mentions the narrator, the voices or the listening experience, so I cannot report a consensus and I will not invent one. What I can usefully do is describe what this particular book puts in a reader’s way.
The first thing is the family. The copy calls the Vangers a clan, and the clan is the whole point, because the uncle believes the killer is inside it. A listener therefore has to hold a large group of relatives apart while keeping every one of them under suspicion, with no page to consult and no family tree to check against. The reading has to carry all of that, and to do it without turning the Vangers into a gallery of comic turns, since broad character voices sustained across a book this long tend to curdle.
The second is temperature. The copy promises a story that arrives at “a dark and appalling family history” by way of “grotesque murders”, and it opens as a commission to look into a cold case. A reading that leans into the horror early has nowhere left to go by the time the horror is earned. A reading too level through the archive stretch will make the opening feel like homework. Whether Reichlin finds the line between those, a sample will tell you and I cannot.
What Readers Say
4.5 from 34,595 ratings, and one point before I quote any of it: not one of the three reviews here names the narrator or discusses the performance, so what follows is a verdict on Stieg Larsson.
Writing at five stars, dirk legume calls it “a slow burner but got me totally hooked”, then observes that “this book seems to have polarised opinions” and lodges a specific complaint about the novel’s habit of naming particular consumer products, which is the sort of detail that dates a thriller faster than anything else.
Simon Brooke’s five-star review carries the sharpest headline in the pool.
Great story, great plot, great characters, so-so prose.
That is a review I would sign. The body argues that Larsson wrote out of a conviction that a society’s values are changed through popular culture rather than through high culture, by way of the films, programmes and books people actually choose. It calls this one, first of all, “a ripping yarn”, and then breaks off.
The four-star review from Cornwallgurl, headed “Best of the three”, is the one to read if you are weighing the whole trilogy. It records enjoying “the slow start, the Scandinavian descriptions and the build up of violence and uncertainty”, and describes Salander as “intrinsically a rather unpleasant person” who nonetheless “certainly grips the attention”. That reviewer says the book was downloaded, which could mean either format.
Who Should Listen?
Crime readers who like a story to take its time will get the most from this, as will anyone who prefers a procedural built from documents instead of chases. It suits long journeys and dark evenings, and it suits a listener who trusts a book to know what it is doing during a slow opening.
Approach with care if you are wary of graphic material. The copy itself promises “grotesque murders” and “a dark and appalling family history”, and none of that reads as decoration. It is the wrong choice altogether if you need a thriller to start at pace. Anyone who came to the Lagercrantz continuations first has gone about this the wrong way round, though the audio makes for a very pleasant correction.
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