Is there any blog more stuffed with odd images, interesting recommendations, & constant interaction with texts wrenched & demanding, than Steve Finbow’s Glass Hombre ? There is not. If you want to know, on a day-to-day basis, what’s rewardingly louche, Finbow is yr man. He’s a bazaar of the bizarre.
Reading: the Millenium trilogy, not very bizarre, or even very good. The crime-writing equivalent of urban fantasy. She’s a tamed goth anorexic lesbian autistic self-harming violent hacker girl; he’s a wodgily conscientious political journo: they fight crime. It doesn’t matter what happens to the bad guys because they’re either paedophiles, right wing corporate CEOs or violent rapists; or all three. Ploddingly correct right-on as an excuse for hitting people with hammers, living proof that simply reversing the typical politics of a genre was one of the laziest, smuggest & most self-satisfied fictional gestures devised by the generation that attained its majority in the early 80s. Aren’t we bored now ? Could we stand something that’s actually different ?
Sorry, would have to disagree with you there, Found “the Girl with the dragon Tattoo” to be very good, Great Plot, and a well told story.
Excellent. I have only heard good things about Larsson’s book up till now and therefore figured it’d be boring. Now that I know you dislike it, there will at least be some frisson in reading it.
By the way, you seem to have put your finger on what bothers me about most modern crime writing, with the exception of Richard Price. ‘Conservative’ politics are still conservative if there’s a bad guy, and as long as the killer is unmasked or the threat is nullified, we can back to our numb little lives happy.
Bit odd how knowing you hate something’ll get me to read it, eh?
I’m with Uncle Zip on the ‘Millenium’ books. With their cardboard characters and wooden writing, they should come with an Allen key in a plastic bag. Not much assembly required.
The writing is pretty standard for journalists turned novelists. They’ve done their research and you’re going to get it, no matter what the info-dump does to the narrative.
I’m currently getting fed up with Volume 2, and just bought Banksie’s latest today…
I don’t doubt the instant, stir-ready emporium nature of Glass Hombre but I find this kind of mooring in the exoticization of Japan more than tedious by now. The relevant construct of the place hasn’t really changed since Perry, and I would apply all of Unc’s terms equally to this cultural sleight of hand. Turning Japanese is just toooo easy.
Hi Colin M, liked your Ikea image, especially given the extended list of furnishings & fittings described early on in The Girl Who Played with Interior Decoration. Martin Lewis (at Everything Is Nice) nailed part of what I feel when he described a short story he was reviewing as “rather conventional in its endorsement of unconventionality”. Fiction like Larsson’s assimilates that which is socially or politically subversive by enlisting the outside in the cause of the inside. By the time this whitewash arrives in the generational cycle, it works for both sides. I don’t see a lot of difference between Salander & the girl scientist in NCIS: she fills the role of the unruly younger daughter who’s weird but thoroughly dependable at heart.
Hi Brendan, you wrote–
Exactly. The assumptions are still good vs evil, us nice readers vs those others; the values are still vigilante; & there’s that very contemporary thing of, it doesn’t matter what we do to them because they’re evil, but everything they do is so offensive we want to cry because of the pain their victims feel, oh the horror the horror…etc etc. So the politics are superficially ok, the aesthetics tweaked, the cultural values brought “up to date” (ie, 20 years behind the times instead of fifty): but the underlying values haven’t changed.
Finbow has made me very excited. Juddery and jittery. Thank you for that link. Thank you Finbow.
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I’m curious: how far are you into the Millenium trilogy? I’ve only read the first book. The only criticism I’d heard was that it was over-written, and I expected to dislike it, but I ended up warming to it as it went on. The middle story (basically, the book minus the first and last 100 pages) was well-handled – but the other storyline held my attention as well.
I know you’re not criticising it on that level, and I totally agree about the characters. Salander, especially, has been praised for being breathtakingly original, when she seemed familiar to me from numerous books and films, to the point of being cliched. I also didn’t think it earned its statistical epigrams (or the original title of “Men who hate women”), which present it as being substantially more political and meaningful than it actually is.
I do think it’s a decent enough book, for what it is. Not earth-shattering or genre-defining – just an adequate, well-presented mystery-thriller that’s perhaps been undermined by its own hype. Crime fiction has a problem, in that it’s basically a conservative form (good beats evil) but there’s a move towards realism when the complexities of real world crime don’t necessarily fit into an enjoyable or satisfying narrative. In Larsson’s case, I think the liberal credentials of the author have been transferred – almost gratefully – to his work, so it’s been embraced as liberal and nuanced when in reality it’s ultimately as traditional as everything else.
But like I said, I’ve not read the other two yet. I understand there’s more going on. Is there?
Hi Steve. Delighted to hear from you.
I’m about two thirds through the second volume, which I might not finish. If anything, it’s even more competently handled, although sometimes the narrative establishing mechanisms are as conscientious as the research.
You sum it up for me in your last two paras, as a book struggling with its own hype. I was disappointed–in fact quite angry–with the Salander characterisation; Larsson’s credentials don’t save it from being a typical journalist’s thriller; & in the end I felt cheated of precisely what you describe here–
The Modesty Blaise aspects of Millenium seem to preclude anything like that, although I guess there might be a big turn somewhere in book two or three.
Thanks for the words on GH. I’m looking forward to your “literary seaside concept-horror novel”…
And I do think Japan has changed a tad since 1853. I’m not trying to exoticize Japan – I live here and it’s what I encounter on a day-to-day basis. As a good friend of mine once said about Tokyo, “the longer you live here the weirder it gets.”