I do not know why the English name of the second Millennium volume written by David Lagercrant is “A girl who takes an eye for an eye”. The original name of the book fits the plot much better. I read it in some strange language, not Swedish.
It is a good detective novel and I will not tell the plot as the best what these books have is the plot. Much of it happens in a women’s prison, which gives some insight to what they look like in Sweden, and in flats or forest or streets of Stockholm. No wild car races, no demolition of the center of the Swedish capital, no shooting down of JAS fighters. This is very good: it will be cheap to turn the book into a movie. There are some authors, like the great Finnish author Ilkka Remes, whose books cannot be filmed in the home country since they would require a budget of Hollywood blockbuster and still appeal only to the local audience.
The plot of this Millennium has twins, both identical and non-identical twins. Lisbeth Salander has the non-identical twin Camilla. Camilla is mentioned many times in the book but does not really appear here. That is good because in the previous book the plot got quite childish: two sisters lead groups, which are in eternal battle. It reminded me of a cartoon.
One of the identical twins is the man who looked for his shadow. Lisbeth gets into quarrels with a female psychopath, who has given a name to her stiletto. There are the bad Islamists, who naturally must kill their sister in order to save the family honor. These Islamists are not from Syria or Iraq, which is very thoughtful considering refugees. These are from Bangladesh. That’s good. Bangladesh is a far away country and they do not speak Arabic and so the book is not anti-refugee or anti-Semitic (Arabic is Semitic unlike Yiddish). Besides, there is a wise and gentle Imam, clearly, this book is not anti-Islam either. It almost does not mention Jews, but the bad lady psychopath once calls Lisbeth a Jewish girl. The bad ones are anti-Semites, or course.
Anyway, there are identical twins, Lisbeth’s lawyer is Mikael Blomkvist’s sister, one of the characters was Lisbeth’s mother’s friend, Mikael Blomkvist and one of the twins were flirting with the same girl. Sweden is small, but probably not that small. With so many relations between the characters this book starts to resemble an Agatha Christie detective, instead of, for instance a Raymond Chander detective, or a Scandinavian detective of the type of Jo Nesbø, Henning Mankell or Leif GW Persson.
Indeed, the book has quite little criticism against the Swedish folkhemmet, if any – I did not notice any. Agatha Christie also did not have any criticism against the ancient regime, only that it is so difficult to find good servants nowadays. Actually, I think the time for social criticism in a detective went already: it used to shock readers in the beginning to hear that it is not quite as good in Sweden as we thought it is, but these revelations do not shock anybody anymore. It is a new world. Those old and more civilized times are long gone.
I like reading such Agatha Christie type stories where everybody is in some way related to everybody and an unknown identical twin pops up from abroad, and there is no deep content. At least if I read a book in a language that I do not completely master. It is easier, these kinds of plots are easy to follow and easy to guess, very nice and easy.
At the same time this kind of a style means that the book does not have the feel of reality. Lisbeth is a mythical hero character and cannot be killed even though she can be buried alive, shot or stabbed with a knife. In this book there is no place for scary parts where a woman is escaping a monster. Here the woman, Lisbeth, is always better than any man and even better than a female psychopath. Damn those feminists, we are fed up.
I do not know if Lisbeth is not a psychopath herself, or maybe a sociopath. She is supposed to suffer from the Asperger syndrome, but I cannot see her as an Aspie. At one point in the book she cheats a murderer to make a confession in a video that Lisbeth sends to the web. I do not think a real Aspie would do such planning. It requires predicting how other people react.
Lisbeth does not have symptoms of schizophrenia. It is clear that she does not have positive symptoms (hallucinations, paranoid and grandiose thoughts) but also not enough negative symptoms. She is a loner, but she takes care of her cleanness and dresses fine. There is nothing to suggest bipolar disease or depression. If we go to personality disorders, she might fit the schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder. Preferably the first one, since schizotypal is mild schizophrenia. But she is not schizoid as she wants to have sex with Mikael and all pretty girls. That’s why I think she may be a psychopath or a sociopath.
If she is a psychopath, she is just acting.
I have another problem with this character. I cannot see Lisbeth as a woman. In this book she tries to create a theory of quantum gravitation and in another book she was trying to find a simpler proof for Fermat’s last theorem. I think that the author wanted to give Lisbeth an odd and time consuming hobby since Aspies have such hobbies, but I must say that women would hardly ever on their free time try to create a theory of quantum gravitation, be they Aspies or not. I say so because I used to spend much of my free time solving quite similar problems and I made some observations of how interesting these mathematical things are to different people (by gender, age, education and occupation). These problems are indeed time-consuming, but typical Aspie hobbies are not so mathematically ambitious.
Lisbeth could be a boy or a young man, not an old wise man. Lisbeth has something that is common with very high IQ people: feeling of being detached and different, feeling of superiority in a way (inferiority in some other), but staying apart as she is not understood. She could be simply a very cleaver teenage girl, but I guess she is no longer a teenager. The age is a problem: you can be odd as a teenager, but then you either go nuts or clear up.
But I am still confused with Lisbeth trying to solve quantum gravity. Marie Curie was ingenious, but she married and had children. She must have been quite normal, only very bright. I just doubt a woman would be like Lisbeth, but a man might. There have been very odd men: Paul Erdös, Theodore Kaczynski, just name it, but not women.
But let us agree that Lisbeth is just an invented character, a false role model for girls. It is false because women are not like that, and should not be like that. The Western lone hero was a man. It was not a false role model, because there are men like that. This world is not for lone male heroes, but their role may yet come in another time. At some point they are needed.
As Lisbeth is not an Aspie, I think the book would not need such episodes, which try to prove she is an Aspie, like in the end Lisbeth interrupts the priest in a funeral and gives an improvised speech talking too silently for anybody to hear. That could be Aspie, but it does not fit to Lisbeth. Or the Aspie sense of justice, which is the reason Lisbeth stands for the Muslim girl against the most dangerous prisoner in the department. That might be Aspie. But against these is the fact that Lisbeth is fully aware of what other people think and do. She can manipulate people. A real Aspie would not want to deal with such problems.
Why I say so? I took some free Aspie tests in the web. My score was always in the middle between normal and Aspie ranges. You will get lots of scores like mine if you test men in any mathematical department of almost any university. People getting such intermediate scores in Aspie tests must be a bit similar to Aspies. Because of this similarity I think I can to some extent guess how real Aspies see the world. They are just more extreme to the same direction. And the direction is that you rather would not even think of manipulating people. You would preferably solve those quantum gravity equations. I might be able to do it, but would not try, an Aspie would not try and probably could not do it. I think.
The book has also a connection to the real world. A book should bring to the mind some real crookedness. Nowadays detectives have to have this kind of content, at least the Scandinavian detectives. In this book this content is the twin research. Twins were separated for the purposes of studying human psychology. It is presented as very cruel and bad.
Sure. Most of the knowledge in medicine, biology, microbiology and psychology and so on, has been obtained by unethical means. They all make animal experiments. Mammals at least, birds probably also, are just like us. They feel the same. These experiments are all criminal, if we want to call them so. It is certainly kinder that humans separate some twins of their species to live their lives in separation rather than infect deadly diseases to other species, kill them and investigate their organs, as happens all the time in this so called research. So, I have little sympathy to those twins. Humans should stop unethical research, but as they do not, let them do it with themselves. We do not need that knowledge. We all have to die anyway, no sense to kill other animals in order to live a bit longer.
There is a weak allusion that something bad is happening now. The book tries to tie recent stock market crashes to stock market crashes in the end of the 1920ies and twin research, or more generally modern IQ and race research, to the racial research in the 1930ies. The book makes comments of growing racism and anti-Semitism in the West.
This is a valid concern, but maybe not the way the author means. In the 1930ies when Nazism came to power in Germany, it did not arise from a rightist movement of the deep depths of people. It was from a secret society with connections to Theosophy and through it to Freemasonry, so to the origin of the revolutionary movement which had as the goal Plato’s Republic. That is why the result was totalitarian, Plato’s Republic is totalitarian.
Anti-Semitism in Nazism was intentional and it also did not arise from the depths of the people. The ultimate reason for it was that a privileged group of Jews had no longer any place in the society: they had a place in a monarchy as king’s helpers and money lenders, but there was no such role for a tribe in a democracy, or in Plato’s Republic. As Jews did not want to assimilate and lose their identity, they had to be moved away. It created Zionism and the Palestine plan. Freemasons understood this long before there were any Nazis.
I think there is a good reason to suspects that what is going on today, that is the rightist movements, is similar to what happened in the 1930ies. This similarity goes so far that neither of these movements originates from the depths of people. It is directed from somewhere. In different countries similar rightist or alt-right parties pop up just like that, very suspicious. When I check who are behind the web sites promoting alt-right, it is again very suspicious. Let us say, it is mostly not Stormfront, the support is from stranger sources.
Yes, I think there is a valid reason to be worried, and the Millennium volume 5 did raise a valid concern, even though very shyly and only at the end.