A friend of mine recently saw the new Hollywood movie of this book and was thoroughly impressed, saying that it was complex but utterly fantastic. This sounds like just my sort of thing then, so I purchased the book with much anticipation. Knowing that there is a lot of hype around the book had previously made me weary of it, in a sort of Twilight weary way. But due to the gushing praise of my friend and the fact that it has of course been a huge success story, I felt sure that there was clearly then something to it and I started reading with enthusiasm.

200 pages later and my enthusiasm for reading what is essentially a humongously long newspaper report was beginning to wane. There is no prose here. Just a calm, sober and balanced reporting of the facts and the facts are somewhat mechanical to say the least. This makes for easy reading, but it also makes for dull reading. Absolutely nothing happens in this book until page 265, and that's half the blinking novel gone. OK we get the main characters introduced and have our fill of background info, develop a little empathy (and I do mean a little), but it's very much by the numbers. The problem is that nothing in this initial marathon is learnt through juxtaposition, intrigue or cunning exposure. So the salient facts and plot devices are revealed with a dead weighted clinical exposition. Hence I found myself distractedly eyeing a newly arrived copy of George R.R. Martins - A Clash of Kings, sat enticingly on my desk and wondering how Tyrion Lanister will fair at Kings Landing, when I should have been concentrating on the book that was rapidly slipping from my fingers due to the fact that unfortunately the principle character was only interested in telling me about nothing more stimulating than his nocturnal reading material and sandwich fillings.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo herself Lisbeth Salander, poses a problem as well. What she does solves the mystery, but what she's capable of doing could have been done by any secondary geek character. My point being that she's not critical to the plot, she's just the device to help solve it. And her own personal story ark, whilst harrowing is not essential to the story either. What would have saved both Salanders role in this book and indeed made Blomkvists journey more palatable would have been a shovel load of character development. Unfortunately even continental drift is faster than the character development in this novel.

If this sounds a little harsh, then maybe it is, but it's deserved because this book is frustrating it's construction ought to be much better. So why do people rave about this novel? Perhaps because under all the layers of finely honed and Ikea flat packed apathy there is a great story in here. Vangers plight mixed in with his leverage over Blomkvists need to confound Wennerstrom's empire is a great set up. There are deft touches. The use of photos in revealing the truth and Blomkvists initial meeting with Salander are a couple of good examples of where Larson hits the mark perfectly. But it's repeatedly let down by what seems to be a literary malaise. In other areas large parts of the novel feel like a first draft.

At about page 100 I was ruminating over the story so far and I made a guess at what had happened to Harriett. 400 hundred pages later and that guess turned out to be completely 100% accurate. Now that really shouldn't happen and if more effort had been spent earlier in the novel it wouldn't have happened. The book does hit it's stride in the last 200 pages. It does finally come to life and there then becomes a genuine need to turn the page with pleasure as you begin to will the characters to win out, but by that point it's not enough to redeem itself completely. It's still not quite there. You end up wanting to give the plot itself a good slap, when in fact that is not the problem as the plot has been just as badly let down by the ambivalent construction as the reader has.

This is a good book it should get 5 stars but it simply doesn't deserve it, due to the way it has been constructed and written. Would I recommend this book to a friend? I don't know. I'd like to but then I would know what I'd be subjecting them to in order to extract the story from it and that would be unfair.

It's a great story struggling to get out of a mediocre novel. It puts me in mind of a famous sketch that Eric Morecambe once did with Andre Previn, in which upon hearing Eric's performance of Grieg's piano concerto, Previn complained to Eric that he was playing all the wrong notes. To which Eric replied, 'Listen mate, I'm playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.'
The Girl with the Dragon tattoo, has a similar problem. All the right notes are in there somewhere, it is a great story, but it's been written in completely the wrong way.