‘Eye’ is back on hacker Lisbeth Salander
Our punk heroine is in the clink, but her page time is freeing
Apparently, The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye is also taking a knee.
Lisbeth Salander, the titular “girl” (with the dragon tattoo) in Swedish author David Lagercrantz’s continuation of Stieg Larsson’s megaselling Millennium series, is curiously on the sidelines for much of her latest adventure, which arrives two years after Lagercrantz’s promising The Girl in the Spider’s Web.
That Salander feels like an afterthought is the most frustrating thing about the exhaustingly titled Eye (Knopf, 368 pp., eeeE out of four, on sale Tuesday), which otherwise delivers an engrossing, if lowstakes, mystery.
The novel starts arrestingly enough, with our tattooed heroine dutifully serving a sentence in a maximum-security women’s prison for heroically, but illegally, saving a young boy’s life in Spider’s Web.
Putting a spark plug like Lisbeth behind bars is a shrewd development for the character, who still finds ways to fight injustice even in the confines of a corrupt penitentiary. She at once butts heads with the daggerwielding Benito, an imposing female crime lord who regularly beats Faria Kazi, a young Bangla- deshi woman with a tragic past whom Lisbeth strives to protect at all costs.
Meanwhile, Lisbeth manages to put her hacking skills to use as she assists muckraking journalist (and former flame) Mikael Blomkvist in investigating a shady ring of doctors and social workers who perform tests on twins to study their development. Naturally, the stakes are highly personal for Lisbeth, whose estranged, murderous twin, Camilla, was introduced in Spider’s Web.
But it’s when Lisbeth is released from prison that she unfortunately goes M.I.A., with much of the novel’s second half devoted to subplots involving identical twin brothers Leo and Daniel, and Faria, whose strict Muslim family comes between her and the love of her life. Neither story has great emotional payoff and both distract from the central duo of Lisbeth and Mikael, whom readers have been invested in for four prior books.
When a vengeful Lisbeth finally resurfaces toward the end, her now-obligatory fall into peril also doesn’t do the character justice. She’s forced to rely on others to save her from a near-deadly dustup with bad guys, and her longawaited confrontation with a fiendish figure from her childhood is principled, but anticlimactic.
Where Lagercrantz succeeds is in diving further into Lisbeth’s backstory, revealing the heartbreaking origins of her emblematic dragon tattoo and fleshing out her father-daughter relationship with ailing former guardian Holger Palmgren, in a passage that is genuinely moving.
And while there may not be nearly enough of her in the story, the glimpses we do see are imbued with a grit and gumption that would make Larsson, who died in 2004 before the series’ staggering success, proud.
Unlike previous Millennium novels, Eye wraps its central mystery on a relatively tidy note, with no loose threads or burning questions that demand answers. Hopefully, that will give Lagercrantz the freedom to dispense with ancillary characters and put our plucky punk crusader back in the spotlight she deserves.