Book Review: The girl in the spider´s web

By David Lagercrantz

The Girl in the spider´s web is the fourth installment in the best-selling Millennium series. Keen readers will no doubt be aware of the fact that the series creator and the author of the previous three books in the series, Stieg Larsson, sadly passed away a few years ago. There are some who would passionately argue that this book which I´m about to review should never have been written in the first place. I´m not about to wade into that debate, mainly because I wouldn´t know what I´m talking about, but I am going to talk about the book itself, which is a convincing enough work of fiction to stand on its own merits.

The reins of the Millennium series have been handed to David Lagercrantz, author of international footballer Zlatan Ibrahimović’s autobiography, I am Zlatan: My story on and off the field. This may not sound particularly relevant, but I assure you that it most certainly is. Writing about Ibrahimović’s spectacular life required the verbal ambidextrousness of Ernest Hemingway ditching his trademark staccato sentences to write a Tudor drama in iambic pentameter. Several of the brilliant and hilarious quotes from the book were actually not taken from lengthy interviews with Ibrahimović himself. Like a consummate musician delivering a symphony on the fly, Lagercrantz improvised quotes that perfectly encapsulated Mr. Ibrahimović. If anyone could pull this off then, it would had to have been Lagercrantz.

Although he possesses left of center political views like the late Stieg Larsson, the two men are very different. A scion of privilege whose father was the editor of the country’s largest newspaper for twenty years, Lagercrantz´s origins story is considerably different from that of Stieg Larsson. Stieg came from very humble, blue collar beginning. His father worked in a smelting plant and later died of arsenic poisoning. It´s very rare that an author´s life is more exciting than that of his characters, but in 1977 Stieg went to Eritrea to train a squad of female recruits to the Eritrean People´s Liberation Front in the use of mortars, a weapons system he had mastered after he was conscripted into the Swedish military.

Little more than a year has passed since the events in the last book, The girl who kicked the hornet´s nest. The equal parts dreary and world weary journalist Mikael Blomkvist returns together with everyone´s favorite female antihero, Lisbeth Salander. There has been a lot of talk about whether Lagercrantz could “handle” Lisbeth Salander. The answer is quite simple, the Lisbeth Salander he portrays is not the same character as Stieg Larsson wrote about because that would simply be an impossibility. As an author entrusted with carrying on with a late colleagues work, Lagercrantz should be allowed a certain amount of leeway. I was not disappointed with the new Lisbeth Salander, and she wasn´t that different from the old one. The die-hard fans will probably not agree with me, but the rest of you can relax, the ship has been left in good hands.

The plot centers around the artificial intelligence research of the deeply flawed but brilliant genius Franz Balder and National Security Agency, possibly the least loved government agency in the history of the United States besides the DMV. With an ageing Mikael Blomkvist´s career in journalism on the ropes, a scoop about Balder and his ground-breaking research might be his last and best chance to stay relevant as a left of center journalist who is so noble he can´t be bought off by special interests and who is so boring that he makes Mitt Romney leading the Sunday sermon in a Mormon church seem interesting by comparison. Thankfully Lisbeth Salander is, as always, pursuing her own shadowy agenda, and the two of them soon cross paths once more. Faced by an implacable enemy from Lisbeth´s past who will stop at nothing to destroy her, she and Blomkvist must work together to save the life of Dr. Balder´s autistic son and stop his father´s research from falling into the wrong hands.

The plot is thoroughly enjoyable and perfect for a rainy day. Lagercrantz largely succeeds in doing the original Millennium trilogy justice. I did, however, feel that there was more to be wrung out of the story. Especially since I know that a sequel will be arriving in a smiling Amazon box before too long. Lagercrantz could easily have tied up all loose ends and made the book a hundred pages longer, as it stands now the avid reader will be left waiting for a sequel to see how it all ends. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading The girl in the spider´s web, and catching up with Blomkvist and Salander.