The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Part II

Stieg Larsson died in November 2004. Yet I thought of his work constantly over a decade later, in 2016. Writing of powerful families steeped in right-wing politics, of seemingly legitimate businessmen who acted as fronts for the Russian mafia, of men driven by hatred of women—I couldn’t help thinking that he had predicted Trump.

I learned I was not alone in this feeling. When I went looking for some explanation for this phenomenon, I happened upon Joan Acocella’s short piece in The New Yorker, “Stieg Larsson and the Scandinavian Right.” The date on the article is July 26, 2011, four days after a Norwegian domestic terrorist shot sixty-seven people at a summer camp on Utøya Island and set off a car bomb in central Oslo, killing eight more. Acocella suggested the massacre would not have been a surprise to Larsson, who spent much of his career as a journalist tracing the rise of the extreme right. As she writes, Larsson is “up there somewhere saying, ‘I told you so.’”

This was exactly the sensation I had with respect to Trump, as I mentioned in Part I. It was as if I heard Larsson’s ghost in my ear, whispering that he had warned about this. In his journalism, Larsson exposed right-wingers’ violence. But he also emphasized that the neo-Nazis everyone dismissed as dead-enders could easily clean up their act enough to start getting elected to high office. The trajectory appeared self-evident to him as early as the 1990s. He and other chroniclers of right-wing groups had a label for this possibility: “political breakthrough.”

That was the tenor of Larsson’s articles for his magazine, Expo. But was it also the theme of his crime fiction? Given the explanatory power of the Millennium trilogy, I began to wonder if Larsson had crafted the books that way on purpose. Were they a political treatise disguised as a work of art? Was The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for our times?

I thought of Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel of socialist utopia What Is to Be Done? Hardly read outside of Russia anymore, the book introduced revolutionary ideas to a wide public in the nineteenth century and by all accounts had a profound impact on Russian society. Lenin gave a pamphlet of his the same title, in a nod to Chernyshevsky’s influence. Surely Larsson, who spent much of his youth as a Trotskyist, would have been familiar with this wildly successful example of a political novel. It struck me as plausible that he intended an homage.

Toying with this notion for a while, I did not know how to prove it one way or the other. Then in doing more research on Larsson, I read his partner Eva Gabrielsson’s memoir of their life together. Gabrielsson mentions that Larsson immediately grasped that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing had been the work of a domestic terrorist—one who had read The Turner Diaries. Even as commentators continued to speculate about the involvement of Islamic groups, Larsson knew that the incident was likely inspired by the right-wing novel that featured a truck bomb blowing up a Federal building.

The Turner Diaries, written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce, is another example of an explicitly political novel, meant to spread ideas as far as possible by piggybacking on the emotional power of story. Only of course it is a dark mirror to a work such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, attempting to incite a race war instead of demanding freedom for Black people.

I discovered that The Turner Diaries comes up in the first issue of Expo. In an article on the Oklahoma bombing, Larsson compares the effect of the book to that of Mein Kampf or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As Larsson explains, “There is a democratic problem with this type of literature. It is not forbidden to write, read or possess offensive books.” It apparently occurred to him that one thing to do was write an even more popular book—or set of books—to counteract these particular ideas. Larsson pointed out that as of 1995, The Turner Diaries had sold 250,000 copies. According to Reuters, the Millennium trilogy sold over 100 million copies in the decade and a half after its release.

Larsson’s publisher, Eva Gedin, noted that he found the writing of the trilogy effortless. This makes sense, since he lived and breathed its subject matter, yet did not have to be nearly so exact in capturing these ideas in fiction as he did in his magazine articles. Any inaccuracy in one of his Expo stories would bring down screeching criticism from the right-wing press, and potentially damage his credibility with readers. In fiction, though, he could relax and give his ideas room to breathe.

Larsson wrote criticism of crime novels before attempting some of his own, becoming a devoted fan of women crime writers such as Val McDermid. In his younger years, he had also written science fiction fanzines. His reading had always intertwined with his interest in politics, even the lightest of it. His friend, John-Henri Holmberg, pinpointed the origin of Larsson’s fascination with the far right. Back in his fanzine days, he had a reader called Lars-Göran Hedengård who turned out to be a member of several right-wing extremist groups. Sharing a passion for the same books with a person of opposite views puzzled Larsson, and he wanted to understand how such a thing could happen. As Holmberg explains, “much of Stieg’s writing in some issues was devoted to arguing with Hedengård.” His political writing sprang directly from his musings about genre fiction. Later in life, the direction reversed, and his genre fiction sprang from his political writing.

As I noted earlier, the original title for the first volume of the Millennium trilogy was Män som hatar kvinnor or Men who hate women. Holmberg suggests that Larsson got the idea to write a series with this theme after writing several articles about honor killings, as well as an essay for a book on the subject. Larsson’s argument was that people in the West like to pretend that misogyny is purely a problem for immigrants, or faraway countries, when our own societies are just as infused with hatred for women. Around the same time of the highly publicized honor killing that sparked the debate, a white Swedish model had been killed by her boyfriend in an equally sensational news story. And yet few people seemed to connect the two, although the parallel was staring everyone in the face. Larsson took this observation and ran with it, linking it to an old idea for a book he’d been kicking around since the 1990s—a time when he’d noted the huge impact of a political tract masquerading as a novel.

Once I saw Eva Gabrielsson’s remark about The Turner Diaries, I became convinced that Larsson intended to create something similar, but forged in a more righteous fire. It strikes me as well beyond plausible now.

In Part III of this series, I’ll reconsider the sexual violence of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.