Stieg Larsson - 20,000,000 People Can't Be Wrong - Can They?

I'm aware that I run the risk of committing literary heresy, and it's early days yet, but I have to say that my dip into Stieg Larsson's ouevre has thus far been somewhat underwhelming. The mere act of typing that sentence makes me feel as though I'm stamping on the head of a beloved family pet, but there you go.

This whole 'publishing sensation' crept up on me only recently. I wasn't really aware of it until a friend bought me a copy of 'The Girl Who Played with Fire' a couple of months ago and it joined the pile of other books on my bedside locker. When I finally picked it up I realised that it was the second in the Millenium Trilogy and I couldn't bring myself to start it until I'd read the first, 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' (yes, I'm that anal - so sue me!).

I bought 'Dragon Tattoo' earlier this week and I started it this morning. I was really looking forward to it as Stieg's own story seems to be such an enigma.

For those not in the know (if there are any at this stage), Stieg, a Swedish journalist, delivered the manuscripts of three crime novels to his Swedish publisher in 2004, only to die of a heart attack shortly afterwards at the age of 50, never to know of his subsequent massive international success. The trilogy has since gone on to sell an estimated twenty million copies...yes, that's TWENTY MILLION!...earning his estate, well, it's hotly disputed but it's safe to assume that it's a shedload of dosh. As far as I can tell from the many websites devoted to his story, he'd never had a work of fiction published prior to the trilogy. How amazing is that?

Anyway, it was with this back story in mind that I began 'Dragon Tattoo', anticipating being blown away. The prologue lived up to expectations with an intriguing little tale about a guy receiving a framed pressed flower on his eighty second birthday. He'd received similar floral birthday tributes on over forty previous occasions and the intrigue lay in the fact that he didn't know who'd sent them or why - a tasty hors d'oeuvre to whet the appetite.

Then I started on the meat of the novel. I'm now on page 28 and I'm not sure if I want to continue. My problem with it is that, so far, it's too polite, too formal and too bloody slow. Perhaps the fact that it's a translation into English from the original Swedish is partly to blame, particularly for the overly-formal dialogue sections.

The translator's name is Reg Keeland. A-ha, I thought, 'Keeland' sounds vaguely Scandinavian so maybe Reg is from that neck of the woods and maybe English isn't his first language. Nope! When I googled his name it turns out that it's a pseudonym for an American guy called Steven T. Murray so that excuse doesn't work. Whatever the reason, I find myself re-reading sentences to make sure that I've understood them, which hardly helps with the 'flow'.

I feel that I should put my cards on the table here. I don't consider myself to be an intellectual and my reading tastes are usually pretty mainstream, if not low-rent (John Irving is about as cerebral as I get). I've read my fair share of crime novels over the years - police procedurals, whodunnits, pathology-based, hard-boiled etc - and if forced to choose my favourite crime genre author I'd go for Michael Connelly, particularly his Harry Bosch novels. For me, the pace of a novel is equally as important as the plot and Connelly's pacing is superb. As I  completed the first chapter of 'Dragon Tattoo' (on page 28, remember?) I couldn't help thinking that Connelly would have reached the same stage of the story by page 5.

To be fair, it's probably just me. I've never liked wading through what I consider to be extraneous information. I tried several times to watch an entire episode of Inspector Morse but I found it so slow that I just didn't care what happened. If they'd crammed the 'action' into one hour rather than two I might have stayed with it but I decided to stick to watching paint dry for entertainment instead.

To discover if it is just me I took a look at the reader reviews of 'Dragon Tattoo' on Amazon. I was surprised to find, amidst all the hyperbole, that a sizeable minority of reviewers had the same reaction to the pace of the book, some to such an extent that they didn't even finish it. Other naysayers stated that the book improves after the first 200 pages!

So, where do I go from here? Do I plod on in the hope that I see the light? Or do I concede defeat now, give away both of my Larsson novels and instead buy Connelly's latest Harry Bosch potboiler (I mean that in a good way), 'Nine Dragons'?

I've rarely left a novel unfinished. It took me several years to complete James Clavell's 'Shogun', but complete it I did (and thoroughly enjoyed it). I've even forced myself to continue with books I loathe to the bitter end, for example; Bret Easton Ellis' 'American Psycho' (not terrible, just truly disturbing), Mark Mason's 'What Men Think About Sex' (or, as I prefer to think of it, 'What Women Hope Men Think About Sex But In Reality Men Are Much More Base Than That') and one of Robin Cook's medical 'thrillers', the single-word title of which I couldn't possibly remember even if you offered me GlaxoSmithKline's annual gross turnover.

In other words, I'll probably do the plodding thing.

Watch this space,

oldblodger