No one says writing a book series is easy. So perhaps it’s no surprise that “The Girl Who Played with Fire,” the sequel to “The Girl with theDragon Tattoo,” would be a disappointment.

Follow-ups are a crucible. The first novel brings the challenges of any piece of literature. At least half, if not more, of the book’s success comes the readers’ experiential discovery of the central characters. Ideally, every page is a new awakening, and the sense of wonderment shouldn’t cease until the book is done.

So the second novel in a serial poses a problem. We know the characters. We’ve already tagged along through an adventure with them. If we’re reading the second book, that doesn’t mean we simply liked the plot and the protagonists; it means we enjoyed the process of learning to like the plot and the protagonists.

Steig Larsson‘s “Millennium” trilogy gives us two heroes: the elder journalist and the youthful computer hacker. While the first book set them up as two towering and borderline archetypal characters, by book two they are almost obscene in their proportion to everything else around them. They are built up into such massive bodies that they exert a gravitational pull, sucking up plot, antagonists, and ink. And like the forces at the centre of a vortex, the closer one gets to them, the faster everything spins.

The first novel is luxuriously slow. The primary mission of the chief protagonist is to write a book. Readers accompany the protagonist’s investigation of the past and watch that past’s repercussions on the present. Even after the climactic crash of past and present, we read through the denouement wherein the same chief protagonist resolves the loose ends by writing another book.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, readers spend most of the novel watching an investigative journalist trudge from cabin to cottage, sip coffee, and flip through old documents as he searches through one family’s history for a missing girl.

At one point the journalist makes a series of discoveries over the course of a single chapter in what is the fastest-paced narrative of the whole story. He finds some old photographs, and realizes that a series of numbers may correspond to bible verses. No answers, but on these discoveries the whole plot turns.

Raising the stakes somewhat, Larsson takes a few small narrative indulgences. First, we learn, the missing girl once babysat the journalist looking for her. Second, the journalist’s arch-nemesis, a corrupt industrialist, once worked for the girl’s family. Sweden is a small country, so perhaps this is believable.

Book two abandons all patience, and is nothing but indulgence. Moreover, it starts with the assumption that the characters are so large that nothing can exist which does not intrinsically involve them.

Observe: over the course of a single page, protagonist Lisbeth Salander discovers that not only is a criminal conspiracy afoot, but a conspiracy with herself at the center. This discovery is the result of a chance encounter seeing her arch-nemesis at a coffee shop. She sees him shake hands with a man we readers know as “the blond giant,” a
mid-level mafioso in the crystal meth, prostitution and firearm business. She then follows the giant as he in turn meets with an associate in a violent motorcycle gang.

Not only is this two-page gumshoe work in Larsson’s sequel painfully lazy in its rushed description, but the author forces the reader to swallow this kicker: “Salander saw immediately that something sinister was going on.”

Imagine Holmes turning the corner of Baker Street just in time to see Moriarty hand a thick roll of banknotes to a saboteur for hire. Would Doyle have built a reputation on that sort of crime-fighter? Especially if upon seeing this mischief, we were told Holmes realized that it meant trouble?

The limp narrative barrels on for five hundred pages of unoriginal development. Where the first novel kept readers riveted with exquisitely subtle interrogations, book two forsakes dialogue almost entirely. Often, we’re told that a conversation happened, but we don’t get to read it. In piecing together a final puzzle in the sequel, the investigative journalist is trying to pry information from a source, both of whom have an immense and immediate amount to lose if the information changes hands. But an opportunity for dialogue, the type of writing that made John LeCarre’s reputation, is passed over: “They agreed in the end to think about everything for a day or so before resuming their conversation.”

Instead of dialogue and investigation, goons jump out of vans to drag people off the street, the arch-villain has a henchman out of a James Bond film, and most of the characters have lots of sex. But mostly, everything is so closely connected to the protagonists that it’s a mystery there’s any mystery at all.

Without giving anything away, imagine the discovery that your arch-enemy was in league with your grade-school teacher who gave you the grades she did to make sure you’d get into a job where your boss is the arch-nemesis’ son – and that son is married to your best friend. No, that’s not the plot, but it might as well be. The first book had mystery and a strong, economic and feminist social conscience. The second was a cross between Days of Our Lives and a Jason Bourne film.

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