Salander is back: The man who perfected Stieg

01 September 2015 - 02:03 By Jake Kerridge, ©The Daily Telegraph

Eva Gabrielsson, the partner of the late Stieg Larsson, has described David Lagercrantz as an "idiotic choice" for the job of writing a sequel to Larsson's Millennium trilogy. The Girl in the Spider's Web by David Lagercrantz, published by Quercus, R340Without putting it in those terms myself, I did wonder - after reading Lagercrantz's novel Fall of Man in Wilmslow, which uses the death of Alan Turing as the springboard for a glacier-paced, ludic and philosophical crime novel - if he was the right man to reproduce Larsson's straightforward mixture of kiss kiss bang bang storytelling and strident social commentary.But, as I read Lagercrantz's The Girl in the Spider's Web, I found that I kept forgetting I wasn't reading genuine Larsson. I have read many of these ersatz sequels in which one writer appropriates another's characters, but never one that enabled such close replication of reading the original author.Before his untimely death in 2004, Larsson had made it clear that the Millennium trilogy was the inauguration of a series that would extend to eight or 10 volumes, and his fans have often speculated about what those books might have contained: what would his tattooed, sociopathic heroine, the ace hacker Lisbeth Salander, get up to in a post-WikiLeaks world? Well, now we know.The book opens with Salander becoming America's Public Enemy No 1 after she hacks into the National Security Agency's intranet and sends a message telling it to "stop with all the illegal activity".Meanwhile Salander's old sidekick, journalist Mikael Blomkvist (more world-weary and pot-bellied than ever but naturally still catnip to the ladies), is struggling to adapt to a world even more infantilised and trivial than it was when Larsson died in 2004. Because he refuses to have Facebook and Twitter accounts, rival journos are painting him as a washed-up dinosaur, and the big media company that has bought a stake in Millennium magazine is demanding less investigative reporting and more articles about "celebrities and premieres".He needs a scoop to save the magazine, and it comes in the form of a breakneck plot involving a murder attempt on an eight-year-old savant who cannot talk but is an ace code-cracker, and an attempt to steal a dysfunctional scientist's groundbreaking work on super-intelligent computers.The translation of this novel by George Goulding is much more satisfying than the clunky English-language version of the original Millennium trilogy. And where Anglophone publishers of the previous books bizarrely decided to shrink Salander's dragon tattoo to something small on her shoulder, it is good to read here that Salander's "large tattoo of a dragon all the way up her back" has been restored to her.Lagercrantz has even managed to appropriate some of Larsson's imperfections, including a capacity for sometimes being boring.But one devours Larsson's books for the plots, the action, the anger, and most of all for Salander. Lagercrantz has caught her superbly, and expertly spun the sort of melodramatic yarn in which she can thrive. ..

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