The Girl with the Dodgy Friends; or why neoconservatives love Stieg Larsson.

Unless you’ve been wandering around lost in your local branch of IKEA for the past couple of months, you’re probably aware of at least some of the hoopla surrounding Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy.

The biggest thing out of Sweden since ABBA, these thrillers (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) have become a global publishing phenomenon. Now with the first of the movie adaptations set to hit the big screen here in the UK in a few weeks’ time, Larsson’s books look like they’re going to get an even bigger publicity boost.

Although there’s plenty to fascinate about the Larsson phenomenon, one of the most interesting elements is the way so many journalists have latched onto the books and breathlessly championed them. In the Guardian, Roy Greenslade writes they are a “must-read for journalists”, while Boyd Tonkin in the Independent, Joan Smith in the Sunday Times and countless others elsewhere have sung their praises.

There’s no real surprise, here. Journalists love reading about themselves, and particularly like reading about themselves when they’re portrayed as incorruptible crusaders for truth. And in the character of Mikael Blomkvist, they may have found their ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy.

As a pin-up for campaigning journalism, this guy is hard to beat. Not only does he manage to land world-shattering, government-toppling-type scoops on a regular basis, he sets his own briefs, leads a life of thrilling adventure and also just happens to be good-looking and irresistible to women. There’s no doubt this all makes for a great read, but as a portrayal of journalists and journalism as it’s practiced today, it bears about as much relation to reality as a Fox News report.

Never mind. It’s clear that most journalists love these books not because they’re a realistic depiction of the life and work of a journalist, but because they depict a life and work most journalists would love to have.

What’s not so clear, however, is why alongside these regular journalists, so many neoconservative commentators and their fellow travellers have taken these books to heart. In recent months both Nick Cohen in The Observer and Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair have hyperventilated about Larsson and Salander, while various other loons around the place seem to have latched onto Larsson’s books as a sort of thinly-veiled political manifesto.

To work out why these guys love Larsson so much, it’s useful to take a closer look at Larsson’s politics.

It is well known that Larsson drew on his own experiences as a campaigning journalist to create Blomkvist, and much has been made of the fact that he wrote for a renowned anti-racist journal. What’s not advertised on his biog blurb, however, is the fact that Larsson was also a revolutionary socialist and was once the editor of a Trotskyist journal.

Now I’m not saying there’s any conspiracy going on here, but once you become aware of this you can see how these novels in certain ways reflect some of the inflexibility of that ideology. Like the work of most ideologues, there’s a strong strand of intolerance and humourless self-righteous judgement humming along beneath the surface of these books.
Just take the titles. In Sweden, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had the painfully literal title, Men Who Hate Women. Catchy, huh?

While other thrillers and crime novels are keen to explore moral complexities and grey areas, there’s none of that in the Larsson novels. His is a world of good and bad, of black and white where the good may have minor faults (Salander’s anti-social tendencies, Blomkvist’s single-mindedness) but where they are unarguably on the side of the angels.

Not so the baddies. Not only are the villains here without any redeeming qualities, they’re also unrepentant misogynists and racists who deserve nothing more than severe punishment, humiliation and death. There are no lesser villains with Larsson. Ever had sex with a prostitute? No excuses – you are an abuser who must be punished. Ever expressed or even harboured some slightly retrograde or un-PC opinions? A good beating, humiliation, your life ruined and possibly death is all that’s coming to you.

Hand in hand with these Dredd-style judgements is a casual approval of violence in extreme forms. When the baddies torture, rape or kill in the books, they are merely expressing their inherent evil. Yet when Salander shoots people, beats them up or ruins their lives (as she does on numerous occasions throughout the trilogy) she is merely exercising her moral right as a victim and as one of the oppressed. We’re meant to cheer her on, and we do. In fact, much of the fun and thrill of the books come in the way they power along as turbo-charged revenge fantasies that stick it to the man with guilt-free glee.

There’s nothing really wrong with that, of course. The avenger has a long pedigree in literature, and Larsson plays with that in a way that isn’t always so humourless and literal. And although these books deal with contemporary politics and the abuse of power, it’s clear that, ultimately, they’re fantasies rather than a realistic blueprint of how to confront oppression.

Clear, that is, unless you happen to be a journalist like Nick Cohen, who in his bizarre piece seems to portray the books as some form of moral template and Larsson himself as the possessor of a righteous certainty Cohen believes is lacking in modern European democracies.

“Larsson had none of the characteristic difficulties of contemporary writers in conveying fear or acknowledging the existence of evil, which afflict even John le Carré,” Cohen writes in his piece. (yeah le Carré, you appeaser. No wonder you’ve got a French-sounding name…)

After praising the Swede for his “generous” politics and claiming that his books gain their power because of the “political knowledge that he gained as a socialist militant”, Cohen then lambasts modern Britain for lacking Larsson’s “principled consistency”.

Of course, all of this is depressingly familiar to anyone who has read Cohen in the past few years. For those of you who aren’t familiar with his dull tirades, Cohen is one of those former lefties like Christopher Hitchens and David Aaronovich who, post 9/11, underwent a sort of reverse-Damascene conversion in which it was revealed that ‘Islamofacism’ was the greatest threat of our era, and that anyone who didn’t understand that or support the war in Iraq must obviously be a fool, an appeaser, or both.

It’s important to note when reading the guff these men write (and yep, it’s always men) that although they tend to bang on a lot about defending human rights and the rights of women, what they seem most interested in is defending their right to see themselves as warriors involved in some grand and glorious global struggle.

As creepy as it is, it’s no real surprise, then, to see the likes of Cohen, Hitchens and all manner of other neoconservatives latching on to the Larsson books. Cohen (a former leftist) and Hitchens (a former Trotskyite) may have turned their back on many of their former beliefs, but they haven’t been able to stop sharply dividing the world into good and bad, and wishing to see the bad as deserving of severe punishment.

Like Salander in the Larsson novels, when it comes to confronting who they see as the baddies Cohen, Hitchens and their fellow travellers all seem remarkably sanguine about the use of violence. So long, of course, as it’s other people both dishing it out and receiving it. Neocons are, if nothing else, dedicated armchair warriors. Let’s not forget that as prominent and unrepentant cheerleaders for the war in Iraq, these guys have tacitly endorsed slaughter and bloodshed on a grand scale, even while claiming to be on the side of the oppressed.

Not that Larsson’s novels should take the blame for this. Larsson managed to confine his violent fantasies to the realm of fiction, where they belong. For Cohen, for Hitchens and for all the other warmongering ‘liberal interventionists’ who have allowed their fantasies to roam free in the real world, the same excuse can not be made. Perhaps it’s time they put down the novels, stopped dreaming about Lisbeth Salander, and learnt to tell the difference between fact and fiction.

It would be a shame if Larsson’s fine and fun thrillers were tainted by their endorsement.

The Body of Lies Index: a more reliable economic indicator than anything the Office for National Statistics puts out.

I live in the East End of London and, looking around sometimes, it’s not always easy to tell that there’s a recession going on. That’s not because the area has somehow miraculously escaped the after-effects of the banking collapse and the financial crisis - far from it. No, it’s not easy to tell there is a recession going on because this place always looks like there is a recession going on.

Boarded-up shops, Poundland doing a roaring trade, a general vibe of poverty and make-do and mend – that was what it was like when I moved here during the boom years, and nothing much has changed since.

Yet even though this latest recession has been largely invisible here, that’s not to say there are not signs of the outside world’s economic woes. If you happen to be passing along Bow Road you’ll be able to see one of these signs, quite literally. Sitting just down from Bow Road tube station above the forecourt of a used car dealership is a gigantic billboard advertising the Ridley Scott movie, Body of Lies, starring Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio.

With its moody, dark design and a tagline that seems to express both the public and the bankers’ respective responses to the recession – ‘Trust No One. Deceive Everyone’ – this billboard has been looming over Bow Road since November 2008.

That’s right – November 2008. Not last year, but the year before. By my count, it’s actually been up there for 66 weeks, during which time Russell Crowe has probably gained another 20 lbs and DiCaprio has lost even more of the boyish good looks he once possessed.

Although it’s now been there so long that most people don’t even notice it anymore, whenever I see it it always sends a slight shiver of anxiety coursing through me. That’s not because I think the movie was crap – although, admittedly, it wasn’t that great - it’s because the fact that this ad is there indicates to me that no matter what some statisticians and optimists say, it’s clear we’re still in deep economic shit.

For me this poster isn’t advertising a half-decent Ridley Scott spy thriller; it’s advertising the fact that for well over a year there has not been one company in the whole of the Greater London area who have had enough money to buy an ad to replace Crowe and DiCaprio’s moody visages. We all knew that advertising was in trouble long before this recession started, but this is ridiculous.

That was why when it was announced the week before last by the Office of National Statistics that the UK had finally moved out of recession, the first thing I did after snorting in derision was take a little walk to see if Body of Lies was still there. Sure enough, it was and still is.

Now entering its 67th week, the Body of Lies billboard has become a sort of oblique economic performance indicator for UK plc, and one whose presence seems a more reliable gauge of the state of the country’s economic wellbeing than any pronouncements made by the Office for National Statistics, the Bank of England, Gordon Brown, Dave Cameron or Mervyn King.

And until that day comes when Crowe and DiCaprio are finally papered over by some other ad, I’ll be consulting the Body of Lies Index (BOLI, for short) before believing anything I’m told about us being out of the woods.