Review: The Millennium Trilogy

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl who played with Fire are the first two novels in the Millennium trilogy penned by Swedish journalist and author Steig Larsson. These books were published after his untimely death in 2004, although their English translations were available in the US only in 20008 & 2009. The books are sequels, however they are also independent entities, one does not have to read the second book to find out how it all ends, in fact perhaps there is no real end so to speak. These along with ‘The Girl who Kicked the Hornets Nest’ are the so called ‘Millennium Trilogy’.

The books are classified as thrillers, however they reflect the issues tackled by the serious journalistic work of Stieg Larsson. In one phrase the main issue is Human Rights; this combined with prejudices, whether racial, religious, cultural or a combination of all of them, domestic violence, dominance (physical as well as economic), misogyny, rights of immigrants, rights of psychiatric patients. In addition, he makes a statement about the current economic differences in the people across the world, corporations, and globalization as well as how that forces the direction of power with criminals using it to their advantage. That is a lot of serious issues to deal with in a thriller. Larsson does a great job of tying together all these elements and does not mince words. He tackles the issues head on and shows how they affect the lives of the characters in his novels. It is not the intricacy of the plots or the flaws which might exist in these two novels which are relevant, but the fact that Larsson writes with such brutality and power that one is sucked into the novels. He does not give us a supreme hero in either the form of Salander Lisbeth or Mikael Blomkvist but the fact that his heroes care about the issues which affect a lot of people in the real world that makes it a more interesting read.