Old-Hat Reviews: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

When I was 12 we were required to write a book review for a homework project. This will be totally unexceptional to my American readers, who I believe as students were constantly required to turn in book reports (as they put it - see, I speak American), but I'm pretty sure this was actually the only time we ever did it. Most of the books I studied in school were laboriously read chapter by chapter, week after week, and then taken apart class by class and theme by achingly boring theme until Charles Dickens was well and truly dead and buried and spinning in his grave. (I'm just not a Dickens person. I find him long-winded and tedious and the fact that Great Expectations finally got exciting at chapter 58 offered no redemption. Actually, I'm really glad we weren't an Emma year, because it would have been horrible to have been put off lovely Austen by the Board of Education.)

Book review, then. My only problem was deciding which book to pick, since we were given free rein in the choice. So many great options - would I go classic with an LM Montgomery or Little Women, or try to impress the teacher with something more sci-fi/fantasy-oriented, something with time travel, perhaps; should I pick a long but straightforward book like Watership Down, or something a little more grown up like Rumer Godden's wonderful Greengage Summer? I don't actually remember what I chose in the end, but I'm pretty sure all of the above and more would have been at my literal and metaphorical fingertips that year.

My friend Alison (let's call her, because that was her name) had a different problem: she'd never actually read a whole book. I found that very very hard to get my head around, but I lent her Tom McCaughren's Run Swift Run Free, because she liked animals and it was about foxes. And not too long. I think I still had to tell her how it ended.

Anyway, that was my first book review, and I think it's time to write some more. Following the lead of my friend and excellent blogger, Morninglight Mama, I thought it might be handy for me to write down my thoughts on books I read or films I see. However, as I never jump on any bandwagon until it's almost completely out of sight, and never get to the cinema for anything more grown-up than Toy Story 3 (which was really very good) these days, these reviews will probably be of books you've already read and films you've already seen. Hence the old hat.

Herewith then, the first in a series. Or at least, what I think may turn out to be one.

I've just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson.

I'm probably the last person in the world to read this, so excuse me if you've thought all these things already. I bought it in the airport as my holiday read, and got about three pages in before being distracted by a cloud or the ice in my Coke or possibly my two children not sleeping on an all-night flight. I found it not immediately engaging, to say the least. It spent the entire holiday somewhere in my hand luggage while I read my aunt's entire collection of Woman & Home and then devoured a Dick Francis in short order on the journey home.

But I picked up the Larsson again once we got back and started to plough through it with a little more concentration. After a while it wasn't so bad. I could put it down and walk away, but I was going back for more. And then, about halfway through, I was walking around the house holding it in case I got 30 seconds to stand still. I was reading it instead of sleeping, and if you knew what sort of sleep regression Mabel's going through at the moment, you'd appreciate how big a sacrifice that is. (Actually, if you know what sort of sleep regression she's going through, I'd be happy to hear when it will be over. Answers on a postcard, please.) I read it while nursing, I held it in one hand and dripped cheerio-milk on my pyjamas from my spoon with the other, I let the kids watch far too many episodes of Little Einsteins as I tried to finish the damn thing: in short, I was absorbed.

And now it's finished, so I can talk about it.

Because of all the hype, I was expecting this to be a really well-written novel as well as a page turner. Frankly, it's not. I mean, it's not Dan Brown, but it's not Nabokov either. Part of the difficulty is with the translation: I often dislike reading translations because it's so hard to get the mood of the writer in a new language. And there were some phrases that jarred, distracting me from the story while I grimaced at the words and tried to figure out what it should have said.

I was hoping to get a sense of Sweden from it, the way Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow - also a translation, but perhaps a much better one, or maybe just of a better book - did of Denmark. With Smilla, I really felt the crunch of the snow, the velvet of her clothes, what it was like - or what I'd like it to be like - in Copenhagen in the dead of winter. With Larsson, apart from all the references to kroner and the placenames, it may as well have been set in Minnesota.

But mostly, I found it a bit unnecessarily gruesome, and it made me wonder how much of the popularity of books like this is because they titillate with gory sexual crimes. It's a good thriller, but so are most of the Dick Francises that fill my shelf o' shame and to which I return time and again because he spins a good exciting yarn and I almost always learn something new from them. And yet nobody rushes out to make Hollywood blockbusters of Banker, or The Edge, or Flying Finish, or any of his other oldies and goodies. (Now I check, several of his books have been made into TV movies. But my point still stands.)

Anyway, I don't think I'll be rushing out to buy the next one and consuming it avidly tomorrow, but if it comes my way in a book sale or to borrow, I probably won't say no. But not right now, because my children can't really take that much neglect on an ongoing basis.