The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

I have just finished reading the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, the sadly deceased Swedish writer. It is a crime novel, set in Sweden, and a rather good one at that too, garnering all sorts of plaudits and awards (the Frozen Dagger, the Silk Handcuff, the Readers Digest Best Brutal Crime Novel Award, etc). It has been a best seller, not only in Sweden, but all over Europe, the States, and now in Muroran too. The plot concerns a (male) journalist, his sullen, anti-social but terrifically talented (female) partner, and their investigation into the disappearance and murder of the heiress of a wealthy industrial family. (Is that correct - a 'wealthy industrial family', as in a family that accumulated its wealth from its involvement in industry, as opposed to a wealthy family made from steel and iron?) Anyway, the book rolls along at a fair old clip, and we get digressions about Nazism in Swedish society, the evils of capitalism, the debate on nurture versus nature, computer hacking, and the country's guardianship laws.

However, and this is probably just recently-turned-40-suddenly-become-an-arch-conservative old me, I found the murder, or rather murders, at the center of the novel to be wearily familiar in their gruesomeness. It seems that you can't have just a murder, and a murderer, but you have to have murders, plural, and a serial killer behind them all. And he can't be just a run of the mill serial killer, but a demented, schizophrenic, Nazi misanthrope, who seems to have some sort of personal quality criteria about dispatching people, usually women, in the most grisly fashion imaginable. And the author, because most sane people tend not to, will do the imagining for you and then give a detailed description of just how the various victims met their incredibly gruesome ends.

There seems to be a race to the bottom in just how sadistic and horrific you can render a murder. The crime in itself is not terrible enough. It must be accompanied by acts of monstrous savagery - and therein lies the problem. It takes a monster to commit such acts, and on relying on such a clearly inhuman perpetrator, it dehumanizes murder, that most immoral of crimes. Rather, the author's feverish imaginings renders it as a grotesque spectacle bordering on the fantastical. Empathy is lost, and with it guilt, and instead we are offered cheap visceral shocks instead. Most real-life murders, terrible as each every one of them are, are more mundane crimes, akin to the actions of the Bull McCabe in The Field, rather than Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs.

I enjoy my crime fiction (when I am not rereading Virgil's Aeneid in the original Latin), but I am growing weary of the incessant tendency to replace crime with carnage. This holds true for the movies as well. By far and away the best crime movie I saw in recent years was Brick, a truly original take on classic Fim Noir, and it involved one plain vanilla murder and the rippling repercussions from same.

As I said, maybe I am just getting old, and the accumulated experience of reading and watching all this crime is finally catching up with me.