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Blomkvist is ultimately aided in his research by a girl who worked for a security firm that had done a background check on Vanger - a girl named Lisbeth. The English translator/publishers were right in identifying the central marketing element of the novel. Lisbeth Salander is easily the single most interesting character in the story. And while the story itself is highly engaging on a number of levels, it never really matches the level of interest generated by Salander.

Being a street-smart hacker, Salander is a cyberpunk heroine. She’s more of an earthbound, slightly less surreal version of William Gibson’s Molly Millions. She’s an interesting evolution of the cyberpunk - the figure who can peacefully coexist with an ominously powerful system she is capable of completely undermining by seamlessly walking in and out of some of the most intense security imaginable. She’s got a dark background - sexual abuse from a legal guardian who she later went on to torture. The dark background feeds the mystery of a character seemingly capable of getting information about anything. The subject of now four films in two years, Salander would stand a very real chance of being our next James Bond if the estate of the author would allow it. (The Swedish adaptation of the three-part series was released in its entirety in ’09. If another writer were to pick-up the character and take her to other parts of the world, it could be very interesting and very, very lucrative.) A woman of poor social skills with a punk fashion sensibility who nonetheless is brilliant in a line of work that can be dangerous. That sort of thing has real potential for a long-running multi-media franchise.

Beyond its action-suspense appeal, the novel does show some of the emotional complexity of sexual abuse - a theme which hits the plot at numerous points in the course of things. And while it’s nice to see that sort of thing explored realistically in a popular format, the seriousness of it IS compromised a bit by the larger-than-life nature of the suspense. Likewise, it’s nice to see some of the excesses of big business used as kind of a sinister backdrop for a story about physical abuse, but casting that against the plot of an amplified, semi-surrealistic suspense novel runs the risk of trivializing the very real, very twisted actions of the super-rich at the dawn of the 21st century.

Män Som Hatar Kvinnor (Nordisk Film, 2009)

The original 2009 film was an indigenous Swedish film, making for a very authentic feel, straight down to the last detail. Michael Nyqvist plays Mikael Blomkvist with a casual disinterest as the film goes through the motions of setting-up the premise over the course of the film’s first half hour or so. The film’s first quarter hour follows a heavily abbreviated version of the first handful of scenes in the novel. It’s all there more or less, but it lacks the depth and finesse of the original text.

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