By Bron Sibree for the Sunday Times
The Girl in the Spider’s Web
David Lagercrantz (Quercus)
David Lagercrantz has a long history of taking risks. “It makes me write better,” says the Swedish journalist and author of nine diverse, risk-taking works including Fall of Man in Wilmslow, I Am Zlatan and The Angels of Amsele. But as risks go, nothing equals that of writing the fourth installment in the fabled Millennium series, which was created by his fellow countryman and now deceased journalist Stieg Larsson and became a global publishing phenomenon after Larsson’s death in 2004, selling 80 million copies worldwide.
“I was terrified,” admits Lagercrantz. “But I couldn’t resist it. I knew the whole world wants to read it and so it was important that I write a good book otherwise people will kill me,” he laughs. “And I knew I would regret it my whole life if I said ‘no’.”
There’s a frankness about Lagercrantz that seems at odds with the extreme secrecy that has shrouded his writing of The Girl in the Spider’s Web – or perhaps his natural candour is part of the reason that Swedish publishing house, Norsdetds, have maintained “a ring of steel” around the book ever since they contracted him to write it in 2013. Not that his frankness extends to divulging the plot of The Girl In The Spider’s Web, which is entirely his own creation and not based on Larsson’s unfinished manuscript.
But he admits to having “a sort of fever in me” while writing it. “I felt a passion that I haven’t felt in years. I would wake up at 4 AM and work because I knew that I had to have a complex intrigue. That’s part of the brilliance of Stieg Larsson’s books, that they are so complex, so many different facets coming together. Maybe part of my passion for this project was the magnitude of it.”
But what ignited his passion most was Larsson’s characters, not least Larsson’s female protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, the brilliant hacker with a photographic memory and a thirst for revenge. “Every century a couple of characters are created that really live, and Lisbeth Salander is one of them … she was such a brilliant invention of Stieg Larsson. And not only Lisbeth, but journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who in one way is her Dr Watson. There are so many other interesting characters in Larsson’s world; it’s a universe that I instantly loved.”
It’s no whim that Lagercrantz was chosen by Norstedts – with the blessing of Larsson’s father and brother – to keep the Millennium universe alive. He has an uncanny ability to get inside the skin of savant or genius-like characters who are out of step with – and often ostracised by – mainstream society in his books. His biography of Swedish inventor Hakan Lans has been reprinted seven times while the 2013 memoir of football virtuoso Zlatan Ibrahimović he ghosted, I Am Zlatan, turned the entire genre on its head, selling 500 000 copies in Sweden within two months and millions of copies worldwide.
He likens the task of understanding Larsson’s heroine to that of comprehending the mathematical genius of Alan Turing in his acclaimed 2015 novel, Fall of Man in Wilmslow. “When I found out all of the sadness of Turing’s life and all of what he achieved, I just had to write it, but I had problems getting inside his head just as I had with Lisbeth Salander. It’s a good thing that she is so crazy brilliant. In Larsson’s book she even solved Fermat’s Last Theorem so in this book I let her be fascinated in black holes and quantum mechanics and those kind of nerdy things that interest me. Maybe I have too much science in the book, but I couldn’t write if I couldn’t put in ideas that I’m fascinated with.”
In writing The Girl in the Spider’s Web too, he says: “I‘ve tried to make people understand Lisbeth Salander more but she has to remain a riddle. All great characters, great icons in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that’s the reason we go back to them over and over.” As for whether Largrantz will himself return to the riddle that is Lisbeth Salander in another book, he says “That’s what I am asking myself.” Besieged with publishing offers and with a raft of his own book ideas crowding his over-active mind, he adds “I really want to collide with different worlds. Maybe next time I‘ll do something even more crazy.”
Read an excerpt from The Girl in the Spider’s Web
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Photo: Caroline Andersson
Book details
- The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagencrantz
EAN: 9780857053503
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