Liberal Democracy's Swedish Fairytale: A slant-eyed perspective on Stieg Larsson's Millenium ("Lisbeth Salander") Trilogy

Human society is a collection of good gals and guys doing their jobs with honesty and vigour. There are a few bad guys determined to ruin this ideal state. They mostly succeed, but for the superheroes who circumstantially come together and foil the designs of the evil-doers. I know this sounds like the description of a comic book plot, but this is the explicit philosophy driving the various plots and sub-plots of all the books in Stieg Larsson's Millenium Trilogy.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo—the first book of the series and the best of a bad lot—merely hints at this ideological underpinning (its plot is also distinct from the later books), but The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest—respectively the second and the third books of the series—spell it out. Unusual circumstances bring together extraordinarily talented hackers, committed journalists, competent cops, and resourceful intelligence officials. They are backed to the hilt by ruling politicians, judges, and captains of industry. This association of good guys not only exposes and foils the evil designs of the bad guys, but also successfully uproots and destroys their organizational structure. End of Story!

Without spoilers (I hope), let us look at some details. In the second and third books, Salander is accused of three murders. As the plot thickens, the intelligence wing gets involved, in addition to the regular cops. Later, ruling politicians and very high-level bureaucrats get into the picture. Among the primary characters, only one cop—a deeply prejudiced person—repeatedly bungles the investigation, and is actively hostile to possibilities that Salander may not be guilty of the crimes she is accused of. An incompetent investigator from a private detective agency with a personal grudge against Salander tries to sabotage the investigation. The prosecutor overseeing the investigators is ambitious, and tries to get mileage out of a sensational case. This makes him vulnerable to manipulation by the villains, and he blindsides the investigation.

Besides these characters, every single cop and intelligence official and private detective who gets pulled into the morass is conscientious, ethical, and committed to truth and justice. Despite enormous odds, they carefully investigate the tiny discrepancies in an otherwise neat picture. At some point, the investigation starts hinting at the nefarious role of a cabal deeply entrenched in the Swedish security apparatus. Even then, neither loyalty to colleagues nor esprit de corps dampens the charge of the good guys.

This portrayal is incredibly jarring. It goes against everything that went into the founding of the modern police, and against how they function in practically every country. The nineteenth century institutionalization of the modern police was a direct response by the ruling elite against uprisings by the working classes, by the slave populations, and by the colonized people in various parts of the world. In India, and in other colonies of European empires, the colonizers had to frequently organize militia to suppress the colonized people; the police were a formalization of this arrangement. In settler colonial states such as the USA, the establishment of the modern police was inextricably tied to the suppression of slave revolts, and to the genocides of the native populations. And in every part of the world, protecting the capitalists from worker unrest/revolt was THE founding principle of the police.

This principle dictates what the police do, and how they act. For example, why do the police patrol the streets? To prevent the working classes from assembling together, to suppress them from organizing, to prevent unionization. Patrols began for this purpose, they continue today for the same purpose. Patrolling also helps in gathering intelligence about the working class. Kindhearted and friendly cops are an asset for this purpose. They have less difficulty in sniffing potential unrest. They find it easier to identify likely leaders of a revolt. They can perceive more clearly the fault lines that divide the workers on the basis of gender, caste, race, religion, language, culture, etc. All this comes in handy when the workers rebel, and the police move in to crush them. The cops who enjoy abuse and violence are more useful at this stage.

Fundamentally, the modern police are the stick to maintain capitalism—a state of affairs in which very few people own all the resources, and wield all the power. For everyone else, backbreaking and mind-numbing toil is the only option to stay alive. In a capitalist social structure, challenge to this status quo is the basic definition of a crime. And the structure ensures that cops—whether kindhearted and friendly, or abusive and violent—work together to crush any such challenge.

That is why time and again, we see the entire machinery moving at breakneck speed to nab a commoner who kills a rich person, or robs a bank, or burgles a mall. This also happens if the victim is a cop. In contrast, the same machinery grounds to a halt if it is a powerful and influential person suspected of committing a crime. In both cases, the system is functioning as expected.

In case of a commoner committing a crime against another common person, various factors may influence the efficiency of police action—the biases and prejudices of the cops involved, the identities of the victim and the perpetrator, the persistence of friends and families of the victim, etc. Whether or not the case is solved makes no difference to the status quo, so neither the police nor the other centres of power care about the case.

And what happens if it is a case of cops or intelligence officials breaking the law, or committing crimes? That depends on who the victims are. The political parties, the bureaucracy, and the judiciary are as invested as the capitalists in ensuring that the various arms of the security apparatus operate without any hiccups. Unless and until the action of rogue officials threatens the existing power dynamic, they do not upset the apple cart. They cannot afford one arm of the police hunting another arm. So if the victims of police high-handedness and intelligence overreach are powerless members of society, the whole system closes in on itself to shield the guilty.

And this is precisely the part where Larsson's trilogy falters. The bad guys in the second and third parts are not threatening the status quo, despite vague talk of a coup against the constitution. They are not trying to overthrow the government, they are not acting against the interests of Capital. Sure, they work with some unsavoury elements operating outside legal boundaries. Yes, they make life hell for a stubborn anti-social oddball who refuses to play along with them. But why should the establishment care about such trivialities.

Yet, that is exactly what happens in Larsson's fictional world. The ruling politicians, the bureaucrats, the journalists, the industry leaders—they all share the ethics, the morals, and the dogged competence of the conscientious cops. And they back the investigating team to the hilt. The sheer density of good guys in powerful positions makes one wonder how the cabal ever stood a chance of getting entrenched, and of carrying out its activities unhindered.

Doesn't the presence of a cabal carrying on nefarious activities from within the bowels of the security establishment indicate that the whole edifice is rotten? A reader might wonder. The books hasten to address this. Mikael Blomkvist—a fearless, stubborn, committed journalist and THE hero who plays a central role in uncovering the plot—repeatedly emphasizes that these are rotten exceptions in the system, the security setup as a whole is not to be blamed. An intelligence official—a polymath superwoman—sings paeons to the security setup, expresses fury that some insiders may be rotten, and declares her resolve to clean up the garbage. Few other characters express similar sentiments.

It is fascinating to compare Stieg Larsson's outlook with that of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the OG Swedish crime novelists and authors of the ten-novel "Martin Beck" series written in the 1960s and the early 1970s. The protagonists of the "Martin Beck" series are exceptionally competent and conscientious cops. But the plots highlight that their competence is in service of maintaining the status quo. A cop with a conscience may understand the desperation of a poor person who strikes against the system, may even be sympathetic to the person. Yet, his job is to play the hunter, to catch this person, and to put her in the maws of an inhuman criminal justice system.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö's cops know that there is a latent hatred of the police in society. It disturbs them, they ponder about the reasons for the hatred. The conflict between his morals and his actions as a policeman become unbearable for one of the cops—a decorated and very high-ranking police official. He resigns. His equally conscientious colleague—the eponymous Martin Beck—continues being a part of the system, in the forlorn hope that he can at least reduce the injustice. Is it obvious that the very best can do no better.

In contrast, Larsson's superheroes—talented hackers, committed journalists, competent cops, and resourceful intelligence officials—successfully defeat the bad guys. These few rotten apples—spread across the police forces, the intelligence agencies, and the corporate world—were the root cause of much suffering. Once they are out of the picture, the Swedish society in Larsson's world is back to being a normal liberal democracy. This normal is messy; the books do not shy away from inequality, injustice, and suffering; but fundamentally, those are NOT structural problems. Most people in positions of power and influence are as decent and as ethical as the majority of the people they exploit. Injustice enrages the captain of industry and the head of the bureaucracy as much as the next person. Why power and resources stay concentrated in the hands of these decent people remains a mystery. The books are not interested in this mystery, they do not even suggest that there is anything wrong with this state of affairs.

Curiously, the author was very much aware of the dynamics of society as a struggle between the exploiters and the exploited. The Wikipedia page on Stieg Larsson states that he was involved in far-left political activism, that he once trained a female squad of Eritrean Marxist-Leninist guerillas in the use of mortars. He spent years researching and documenting far-right extremism in Sweden. Threats to his own life did not deter him from this mission. The awareness of society gained from his left-wing perspective, and from his journalistic explorations, is evident in various parts of the three books. They show how men in positions of power exploit and abuse women, they show in excruciating detail how an outcast like Salander is forced into a life of legal and social precarity. They lovingly portray how the presence of Asians, Africans, and Eastern Europeans has enriched Swedish culture. Characters talk about a real-life case in which the police had implicated an innocent person, and how an ordinary citizen doggedly pursued and uncovered the truth. There is mention of scandals involving the security police in the radical 1970s.

Yet, when it comes to the mysteries at the heart of his fictional world, Larsson refrains from taking things to their logical conclusion. This is true even in case of the first book. An elite family, practically the royalty of Swedish industry, is shown to be deeply dysfunctional. Over several decades, some members of the family engage in shocking levels of violent abuse, and in eventual murders of their victims. However, the book exonerates the good guys of the family, it accepts that they never had a clue about the horrors going on in the bosom of their own industrial empire. Eventually, the bad guys are out of the picture, and everything is back to normal, with a member of the same family, an erstwhile victim, in a leadership role. The book refrains from exploring the thesis that this kind of abuse is simply a variant of the exploitation built into the very structure of capitalism.

The second and third books expand this "few rotten apples" theory to the whole of society. Similar to Sjöwall and Wahlöö, Larsson, the journalist and activist, was aware that the existing social setup is a crime against the overwhelming majority of people. But in his fiction, he could not shake off the (metaphorical) pressure exerted by the same setup to obfuscate this reality.

To her credit, Lisbeth Salander remains a dissenter and a rebel in an otherwise tidy world. To anyone in a position of power and authority—the industrialists, the bureaucrats, the cops—she is unrelentingly hostile. She never lets her guard down, never abandons her suspicion of the elite. Her life experiences have sharpened her antennae, and her creator's fairy tale does not fool her.

But even in Salander's case, Larsson shies away from tackling reality head on. The author is keen that his ideal liberal democratic society accept social misfits as they are, without demanding that they conform to the norm. However, Larsson diminishes the possibilities by making Salander a kickass heroine and a genius in computers, in mathematics, in chess, and in anything else she sets her mind on. And it isn't Salander alone. There's the polymath superwoman (mentioned earlier) working as an intelligence official. There's an exceptional journalist and editor. There are many other characters of lesser importance. To varying degrees, all of them are social misfits, and all of them are brilliant in some field or the other. Larsson indirectly offers traditional society their genius, or at least their brilliance, as a reward in exchange for accepting them as equal members. Say, these people were weirdos from a traditional perspective, but were not outstanding by the parameters defined by the same society. Would they have a place in Larsson's liberal utopia? The books simply sidestep this question by populating the plots with genius non-conformists.

Miscellaneous comments

• The plots glamorize CCTV cameras and associated surveillance tech—from my vantage point in the year 2024, I find this jarring
  
• Larsson fetishizes Apple devices, this isn't dictated by any of the storylines
  
• In these books written by a journalist, Mikael Blomkvist—an exceptional investigative journalist—gets in bed with several of the women characters, especially with the brilliant and professionally accomplished women populating the plots
  

A sneaked-in tribute to the "Martin Beck" series?

In The Abominable Man—the seventh book of the "Martin Beck" series—a persecuted policeman named Åke Eriksson has a six-year old daughter, Malin. The book came out in 1971. In Stieg Larsson's trilogy written roughly three decades after The Abominable Man, there is a thirty-something journalist named Malin Eriksson, who rises up to become Millenium magazine's editor-in-chief, albeit for a short stint. I do not know if this was just a coincidence, or whether it was Larsson's way of offering tribute to the OG Swedish detective novelists.