I just got finished with The Girl in the Spider’s Web. I’d read the original books, Stieg Larsson’s Millenium Trilogy, not too long ago and they were excellent. I don’t think I’ll even try to write much about them except to say that as well as being entertaining and interesting, they are books that delivered a message (or messages?) that had a strong personal impact.
The author of the original series, Stieg Larsson, died of a heart attack (at like, just about MY AGE!) before the books were even published. They weren’t complete so parts of them were written by ghost writers. It’s done fairly well but the second book, which needed the most work, did stand out as the weakest of the three.
Maybe that’s just personal prejudice based on the idea that only the original author is going to do a good job with the writing but I didn’t know that the second book was incomplete until after I’d read it. Learning that it was partly ghost written was an “aha” moment because I’d had a hard time getting through parts of it.
Overall I liked this book. It is not as good as any of the original trilogy, but it’s worth reading. Just don’t have the expectation that it will deliver the same impact as the originals and it can be pretty entertaining.
In all fairness, the author explains up front that he isn’t necessarily trying to channel Stieg Larsson. He’s straight up about acknowledging that this is a new story that happens to use the characters created in the earlier novels. He says, “I realized early on how idiotic it would be for me just to imitate him. This is my own prose.” True and when I kept that in mind I was able to really enjoy the book.
At it’s roots it’s a spy story; bad people are doing bad things and the good people are trying to figure out what’s going on and stop them. There’s a bit of revenge thrown in but in my mind that was somewhat contrived. There are subplots and attempts are made to connect the main characters back to their roots. It is done reasonably well – the book reads in a similar fashion to the originals. It has a number of parts that come together at the end – but they’re never really separated all that much. There is mention of some of the old characters that seem to have been thrown in as an attempt to lend legitimacy to the book. They weren’t needed and didn’t add to the experience.
What seems to be missing in this book is a message with a purpose. The original trilogy was about violence towards women (and children) and served up a fresh (or at least different) view that caused me to think about a topic that I shy away from. This new book doesn’t seem to bring up anything new. It shifts gears away from personal, emotionally important topics towards corporate espionage, power and corruption. That’s all just fine but doesn’t really define a book with a purpose.
As I got towards the end I started to think of the book as though it was written about a screenplay. The characters aren’t as empathetic and don’t have the depth that was be there in the earlier books. It’s very much like more recent books that are continuations of the orignals by Tom Clancy (“A new Jack Ryan novel”) or Robert Ludlum (Jason Bourne series). Loved the originals, the “based on” books just didn’t do it for me.
It turns out that there really is something about a great, original author that can’t quite be duplicated. I guess that’s why writing is called an art.