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.

Why it's OK to like Paul Auster

There’s a lovely scene part way through Paul Auster’s latest novel, Invisible, where the main character goes to the cinema with his sister to watch a film. The movie is Carl Dreyer’s 1955 classic, Ordet, and Auster recounts the famous final scene of the movie, where the farm woman who has died in childbirth lies stretched out in an open coffin and the mad brother commands her to ‘Rise up’. As the camera rests on her, she slowly begins to move and eventually opens her eyes and sits up, fully restored to life. Auster writes:

There is a large crowd in the theatre, and half the audience bursts out laughing when they see this miraculous resurrection. You don’t begrudge them their scepticism, but for you it is a transcendental moment, and you sit there clutching your sister’s arm as tears roll down your cheeks. What cannot happen has happened, and you are stunned by what you have witnessed.

What’s interesting about this is that the audience’s response to this moment – half of them laughing and sceptical, the remainder moved by what they’ve seen – also seems like a pretty accurate reflection of the way that Auster’s novels divide readers into sceptics and believers.

Although that division has always been there, of late there seem to be more mocking sceptics than ever before. It’s become rather fashionable in the past couple of years to slag off Auster, with the consensus growing among many critics and readers that he’s either a novelist past his prime (if, indeed, he ever had a prime) or simply a one-trick pony whose repetitions now annoy rather than enthral.

Even among faithful fans, there has been a waning. A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a friend who admitted to feeling embarrassed when he thinks about how much he loved Auster’s books back in the day. He’s now convinced that Auster shot his load with the New York Trilogy back in 1987 and has been firing blanks ever since. Considering this same guy once told me he had “religious feelings” about Auster’s 1989 novel, Moon Palace, and you get a sense of how far the Brooklyn-based author has fallen out of favour.

As someone who at one time devoured everything that Auster wrote, I can understand this jadedness. It’s hard to deny that from Mr. Vertigo onwards, there’s been a steady decline in the quality of Auster’s output, with every promise of a slight return to form (The Book of Illusions, Oracle Night) dashed by dross such as The Brooklyn Follies or the execrable Travels in the Scriptorium; a book which reads more like a Paul Auster parody than an actual novel. Even Invisible doesn’t quite cut the mustard, despite having some lovely moments.

Yet after reading the recent broadsides against Auster by James Wood in the New Yorker and by Wood’s acolyte, Leo Robson, in the New Statesman, I was left feeling that Auster had been given a raw deal, and that there was something slightly wrong-footed about their attacks. At first I thought it was to do with the obvious problems they have with Auster’s style. Wood writes:

One reads Auster’s novels very fast, because they are lucidly written, because the grammar of the prose is the grammar of the most familiar realism (the kind that is, in fact, comfortingly artificial), and because the plots, full of sneaky turns and surprises and violent irruptions, have what the Times once called “all the suspense and pace of a bestselling thriller.” There are no semantic obstacles, lexical difficulties, or syntactical challenges. The books fairly hum along.

Wood intends this as a criticism, which is in keeping with his well-established disdain for plot or of anything that even hints of the narrative drive of genre fiction. Far from being a sign of skilful writing, the fact that Auster’s novels “fairly hum along” is here a sign of their weakness. For Wood, style is all, but it is style within a particularly narrow bandwidth. He expends quite a lot of effort trying to point out why, exactly, Auster isn’t up to scratch in this department, but ends up coming across less like an insightful critic and more like some aged pedant making tortuous points about grammar.

While it’s true that it may lack complexity, there is still grace and elegance in Auster’s writing. It is smooth, demotic and readable, and his playful borrowing from the language of B-movies and hardboiled detective fiction is not only nicely done, but, judging by Wood’s piss-poor parody of Auster’s style at the beginning of his review, harder to pull off than it looks.

Of course quibbles about writing style are a matter of taste (unless we’re talking about the truly bad, such as Dan Brown), but after I got past that there was still something about Wood and Robson’s reviews that niggled. I think ultimately it’s to do with the way they both dismiss the one element in Auster’s books that I think make them interesting: his interest in coincidence, chance and mystery.

For Auster, coincidence, chance and the mystery that is engendered by these elements are not just nifty devices or recurring tropes; they are something fundamental to his fiction and to his life. Read some of his non-fiction such as The Book of Memory, The Red Notebook or True Tales of American Life, and you’ll see just how important they are. Random events, chance meetings and bizarre coincidences happen all the time in Auster’s work (and seemingly in his life), and while Wood sees these “accidents” that “visit the narrative like automobiles falling from the sky” as a sign of the author’s “creative lack”, I think there is something more sophisticated going on here - at least most of the time.

More than a narrative cop-out or some deus ex machina that artificially propels the story along, in his best books these “accidents” combine to create an atmosphere of heightened emotion and mystery which feels very much like life. Doesn’t it sometime feel that amid life’s randomness, the stars occasionally align? That every now and again things happen that make you feel that perhaps there is a mysterious undercurrent of meaning, direction and purpose bubbling away beneath the surface? Wishful thinking, perhaps, and Auster never says otherwise. But it’s this intangible quality, this romantic mystery and willingness to not tick all the boxes that, for me at least, makes Auster a writer whose best work has something emotional, hopeful and strangely powerful about it.

For Robson, however, Auster’s love of mystery is merely a front for his lack of ability: “The romance of the inexplicable has obvious appeal for the writer with limited explanatory powers,” he intones. And maybe he’s right - maybe Auster isn’t up to the job of explanation. But perhaps Auster’s love of mystery, coincidence and enigma also reflects a heartfelt belief in the limits of explanation - and, by extension, in the limits of fiction, of language and of understanding itself.

That sort of openness and humility are not qualities you’ll find much of in the late work of José Saramago, the author whom Wood unfavourably compares Auster to in his piece, and whose recent books feel like little more than cold, predictable and affectless exercises in style. Uncertainty, doubt, and surprise have little place in late Saramago, for whom every mystery – even Death itself in Death At Intervals – can be pinned down, personified and put in its place by the deadening weight of his comically grave cynicism.

It seems to me, then, that whether or not you buy into Auster is ultimately a matter of temperament; of whether you see his concerns as gauche and unsophisticated, or whether you’re willing to at least give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s whether you’re the sort of person who pisses themselves laughing at the end of Ordet, or if you’re someone who finds the climax of that film moving or meaningful.

Like the character watching Ordet in Auster’s novel, I don’t begrudge anyone their skepticism. But I’m also not ashamed to admit that Auster’s books have moved me, and I’m hoping they will do so again.