The Girl Who Forgot Her Book Review Was Due

By Dominique L.

                     In "The Girl in the Spider's Web" David Lagercrantz picks up the story-lines of characters Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist from where the original author, journalist Stieg Larsson, left off over a decade ago. In this newest addition to the Millennium series, Lisbeth points her carefully honed hacking abilities at the NSA while Mikael wrestles with the declining health of his magazine and journalistic life. In classic Larsson style, Lagercrantz springs a conspiracy on the characters and they set off to untangle the web of secrets. It's a formula that is so beautiful and intricate that its nature is hardly noticeable. If done properly, Lagercrantz has successfully mastered Stieg Larsson's technique and matched his creativity, if not, then he'll probably never live it down.

            The result was a mixed bag. After the book was released in September of 2015, the fans were either A: delighted or B: wanted to pretend it didn't happen; few fell in between. Here's "the good, the bad, and the just plain shit" (Jack Howard, Dean Dobbs) for David Lagercrantz's "The Girl in the Spider's Web".

            Since we're talking narrative modes, let's break it down. The book follows Larsson's signature third person narrative mode, trailing a fair amount of characters (not just Salander and Blomkvist). Lagercrantz seemed to capture Larsson's technique: simple, information packed, and complicated. However, if we're going off the title of his work, it didn't quite meet the quota for complexity and elegance. The base information was just that little bit too basic. Larsson was famous for his epic subplots, but Lagercrantz's writing feels almost science fiction-esque with long discussions of the singularity and AIG/AIS (artificial intelligence general/super).

Character-wise, Lagercrantz is clearly passionate about Larsson's fictional world and its inhabitants. His admiration for Mikael Blomkvist is evident in both description and character dialogue. He (very) often uses other characters to praise Blomkvist; this he tries to balance with some Mikael-pity-parties. It doesn't work. 

Unlike Mikael, Lisbeth is hardly mentioned – the girl who quite literally puts "the girl" in the title hardly surfaces in Lagercrantz's novel. In Larsson's books, Lisbeth's story, much like herself, would disappear and resurface sporadically. Larsson would typically take the reader through just enough chapters involving other characters' story-lines to make you wonder "Where is Lisbeth?" Just as you'd ask, he would bring her back. Here's where David Lagercrantz fails Lisbeth fans: we don't wonder when Lisbeth will surface, we wonder if she will. Even when she does finally come back, her story seems shallow and she actually explains her beliefs. To the reader. If you know Lisbeth, you know that that's not Lisbeth.

"The Girl in the Spider's Web," or in Sweden, "That Which Does Not Kill Us" has all the characters that readers have come to love and, no doubt, most were just excited to see their favorite characters back in action. However, Lagercrantz lacks Larsson's signature style and his energy just isn't enough to mask the simple fact that he is not Stieg Larsson. A little more violence, a little less sci-fi, and a simpler approach to the characters' inner dialogue and he might have actually had us fooled.

THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB

By David Lagercrantz

Translated by George Goulding

403 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.