Obviously there is a lot to say about Stieg Larsson's three novels The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest.
Lizbeth Salander is a compelling character.
I find the way that Larsson plays with the ideas of psychosis, social withdrawal and autism.
He manages to take us into Lizbeth Salander's world, however it is described.
Larsson's portrayal is quite nuanced. He allows his characters to develop and this development is most subtle in the case of Salander.
Let us consider her as a tormented soul, someone who comes from an horrifically vicious background.
Larson portrays her, convincingly, as distrustful of everyone, distrustful of any ingress that might cause her pain. But, as this changes through the novels, Larson describes these changes with the bear minimum of relevant commentary.
The genre that he is writing in demands certain things of the plot and, therefore, the characters. It is detective novel with a fantastic plot. Interwoven into this is a certain amount of politics and social observation. But most of all the characters have to be convincing within the confines of an exaggerated moral tale. Most of the story is page turning action. However we do enter into the inner worlds of the two main characters, the male protagonist Mikael Blomkvist and the heroine, Lisbeth Salander.
This, then, isn't a masterful work of deep internal insight into each character. We are only in the thought space of two characters when we are inside at all, over the course of the several hundred pages of the three novels.
The question is why this is so compelling?
I have found that it is in Salander's withdrawal from people and her ability to find life traversing the Internet as a deviant invader she has her most compelling power. The fact of her alternative world. She has penetrated a barrier because it was urgent for her. This has an interesting parallel in my review of Logicomix.
To be continued ...