Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | NXg | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest |

Contemporary classics

New books in Old series

The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, Steig Larsson, Maclehose Press, p.602, price not stated.

Such trusted philosophers as Iron Maiden and Def Leppard have assured us that only the good die young, which unfortunately proved to be a spot-on prediction in the case of two writers who are posthumously hitting current headlines.

Douglas Adams, who died at 49, created a world that helped us make sense of the one in which we live with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy quintet; now a sixth book And Another Thing has been added to that galaxy by Eoin Colfer, creator of the Artemis Fowl series. Swedish author Stieg Larsson died at age 50 before his Millennium trilogy became an international publishing sensation; the last of the series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is newly released.

Technically, Hornet’s Nest can be enjoyed on its own. However, that would be a pretty daft choice as the prior two books are also complex, compellingly written yarns. Added bonus: Larsson’s extremely large dramatis personae make sense when you begin at the beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, which have apparently sold more than 15 million copies.

At the heart of the trilogy is the eponymous “Girl” of the titles: pierced and tattooed neo-punk Lisbeth Salander, one of the most unusual literary heroines in recent times. She is many contradictory things: recalcitrant loner, brilliant computer hacker, borderline autistic-savant, a maladjusted misfit with bisexual tendencies and a strong sense of justice. The diminutive Salander responds ferociously to violence and injustice; she can — when necessary — rout strong men many times her size.

Hornet’s Nest picks up from where the previous book ended. Salander continues to be prime suspect in three murders that led to a nation-wide manhunt — even while she is fighting for her life in a hospital from multiple gunshot wounds, including a bullet lodged in the brain. In the same hospital lies Alexander Zalachenko, the former Russian defector with a deeply twisted connection to Salander; members of the Swedish police can, and do, go to terrible lengths to protect his terrible secrets. Meanwhile campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist — one of Salander’s few friends — ropes in his colleagues at Millennium magazine to work on her behalf.

The book unfolds from the multiple perspectives of journalists, Sweden’s secret police Sapo, politicians, doctors, lawyers, criminals and law enforcers to eventually lay bare the insidious network that has ensnared Salander in its web. Larsson likes detail and the trilogy clocks in at well over 1800 pages. Every character inhabiting Hornet’s Nest’s very Nordic world is lavishly described. Yet, ingeniously, all this information never once hampers the plot’s forward momentum.

Hornet’s Nest sees a reinforcement of the trilogy’s themes such as high-level corruption, the violence that men do to women, and the State’s tendency to ignore or cover up these crimes, leading to grave injustices. In Larsson’s worldview — as epitomised by Blomkvist — words have power. There are bad guys who need to be uncovered by investigative reporters and conscientious law enforcers — and punished.

The ‘unputdownable’ trilogy is neither high literature nor a simple thriller that’s just one among the recent wave of Nordic crime detection. Larsson has created something quite unique — books powered by that very old-fashioned belief in a moral imperative to bring bad guys to justice, but whose stories are played out in the very-modern arena of computer hackers, violent crime and sexually/intellectually liberated women.

The books are an obvious extension of Larsson’s own life as a crusading journalist who was anti-fascist and feminist; he was the editor-in-chief of the anti-racist magazine Expo, and regarded as an expert on right-wing extremist and Nazi organisations. The tragedy of the author’s death due to stress and overwork has only enhanced the mythical status of Millennium.

On a lighter note, death isn’t an end, if And Another Thing is to be believed: “There is no such thing as an ending, or a beginning for that matter, everything is middle.” We’re certainly in the middle of some major passing-the-baton activity where literary icons are concerned. Take Hundred Acre Wood’s Winnie the Pooh, bloodsucking Dracula or suave James Bond: their creators are long dead but new — sanctioned — writers are taking over these “franchises” and invading the bookstores.

And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer, Michael Joseph, p.340, Rs. 399.

A Hitchhiker reboot seemed an impossible task, since Adams had got rid of most of his protagonists — and Earth itself — in Mostly Harmless, the last of his Hitchhiker books. But when entrusted with the mission, Eoin Colfer seemed to have taken the iconic, all-purpose advice of the Guide — “Don’t Panic!" — to heart. Using such devices as multiple universes, infinite improbability drives — and a green alien called Wowbagger — he pulls off the literary sleight-of-hand of resurrecting the old crew.

We are back to hitchhiking in And Another Thing with two-headed intergalactic president Zaphod Beeblebrox (who appears minus one head), depressed earthman Arthur Dent, crusading Trillian, sanguine Betelguesean Ford Prefect, and sulky teenager Random Dent. Wowbagger, the immortal green alien whose aim in life is to insult every creature in the universe in alphabetical order transforms from a minor character in previous books to a major player.

Wowbagger is bored-to-death by life but can’t actually die. Zaphod blithely promises to have him killed by the god Thor — which introduces Asgard, the country of the Norse Gods, and its inhabitants into the Hitchhiker universe. Other plot strands revolve around the bemused Arthur’s attempts to connect with his petulant daughter Random, the actual “last” colony of Earthlings, and a slightly lacklustre romance between Wowbagger and Trillian.

Colfer’s own publicly-expressed reverence for the original has certainly won many fans over. Cleverly, his book stays true to the spirit of Adams’s weird and wacky world of pan galactic gargle blasters and off-the-wall humour, without attempting to blindly replicate it. Thing is nicely droll in parts, as in the Guide Notes scattered through the narrative that offer entertaining if useless trivia. For example, the Note on Zaphod’s spaceship Heart of Gold informs us that the spaceship “was so essentially cool that one look at its brochure could skip a teenage male a couple of decades into the future, straight into the middle of his own mid-life crisis.”

Yet some of the Notes feel forced, and this is the underlying hitch: that the eccentricities of a character or the silliness of a situation can feel determinedly bizarre rather than spontaneously absurd. It might seem like nitpicking, but the subversive joy of Adam’s creation lay in its acknowledgement that the universe is arbitrary; that nothing is determined so we might as well celebrate life’s illogical randomness; and that there probably is a better answer to the meaning of life than 42.

Adams’s original Hitchhiker’s Guide pulled off the often-opposing goals of being both cult and part of mainstream culture. There seemed little need — other than a commercial one — in trying to add to it. In fairness, though, the last book of the Douglas quintet wasn’t quite up to par. Douglas himself is supposed to have described Mostly Harmless as “a very bleak book”, adding that he “would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note”. In that Colfer succeeds — he brings favourite characters back to life in a wittily written tome that reminds us that Hitchhiker’s Guide was the best bang since the Big One. Froody.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail