Tag: journalism

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, by David Lagercrantz

This is another entertaining thriller from the author who took up the mantle of Stieg Larsson. It is again about Lisbeth Salander, the computer hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, the journalist committed to social justice. In this case, it is about their tense confrontations with villains who claim they are legitimate scientists. These scientists have been conducting a study of twins, a study intended to prove how differently twins evolve when brought up in different environments. But Lisbeth and Michael learn it is also a study that cares little about the harmful effect of this study on the twins.

Since Lisbeth is a twin herself, and was brought up apart from her twin sister, this study interests her. Especially when she discovers the harm it has done to various twins, and the desperate efforts of the scientists to hide those harmful effects. However, when we encounter her, she is in prison for a fabricated crime that is not made clear. And the initial tension of the novel rises in that prison between a fellow prisoner, Faria Kazi, and another female prisoner, Benito. Faria belongs to an Islam family whose sons are zealously guarding the family “honor,” after their sister Faria falls in love with a boy outside their clan. And Faria, is in jail after her revenge against one brother who tried to preserve the family honor by ordering the death of her fiancé.

In other words, there are various stories going on here. One is about Lisbeth’s prison life and the evil Benito, a woman prisoner who runs the jail because of an ineffective, cowardly administration. Another is about Lisbeth’s former guardian, Holmer Palmgren who visits her with news of the twins study. And still another is about the Islam family and the conflict between their daughter and her brothers. Finally, considerable space is spent with two of the twins in the study, Leo Mannheimer and Dan Brody, both prodigies, one a financier and the other a musician. They live opposite lives, of wealth and poverty, and then discover each other and want to expose what has happened to them. Another is about a dying woman scientist, Rakel Greitz, who does not hesitate at murder in order to conceal the cruelty and illegality of the twins study. While still another story follows police inspector Jan Bublanski, whom Lisbeth and Mikael rely on to help them expose and arrest the villains.

Because she is in prison for much of the novel, Lisbeth does not dominate the action here, not as she has done so in past novels. Her partner in the series, Mikael plays a more significant role. A famous journalist, he is a defender of social justice, and he seeks to expose the study of twins for his magazine, Millennium. It is he and Bublanski who control the final action, but considerable time is spent, in the meantime, with the twins Leo and Dan as they seek to adjust to an incompatible world, then discover one another and maneuver desperately to survive the evil scientist, Grietz, who does not wish the study to be exposed. And who, moreover, enlists Faria’s family to help protect the secret. Which also results in Lisbeth being kidnapped. Thus is built the reader’s concern that Mikael and Bublanski thwart the villains, that Lisbeth be rescued, and that Faria and Dan be saved.

What also increases the suspense of this novel is a narrative technique employed by author Lagercrantz. Through much of the novel he constantly switches the action from one confrontation to another, or from one moment in time to another. The result is that we continually leave a crisis faced by one character and go to one faced by another. Thus he moves back and forth from Lisbeth to Benito to Faria Kazi, or from Dan Brody to Leo to Greitz, or from Mikael to Bubanski to Lisbeth. For some critics, this switching of viewpoints is too much, but for me it does work to heighten the novel’s suspense.

One drawback to this novel that critics have cited is that there is too much going on. There are too many plots: the prison violence, the murders involving the twins study, one in the past and one in the present, the turmoil in the Moslem family, the kidnapping of Lisbeth, and the back story of Leo and Dan, also both in the past and in the present. And that as a result the novel has no textual depth. There is certainly a legitimacy to this complaint. But what these various plots do is keep the narrative moving and intensify the suspense up and .

But my major complaint is that the novel ends too neatly. There is a final dramatic confrontation or two, but the good guys win and the bad guys lose somewhat matter-of-factly. There are no dramatic revelations, no unexpected ironies, no changes in the reader’s understanding of the characters or their motivation. There is no punch at the end.

Another matter I did not grasp was the title. Not that any title in this series could not be exchanged with one of the others. All present Lisbeth as the main protagonist. But the revenge suggested by this title is not evident, and Lisbeth certainly does not play the prominent role that she does in the other novels.

I will be interested in more adventures of Lisbeth and Mikael as they appear in further novels by Lagercrantz. But, in retrospect, I do agree with the critics above, and I would hope this new author concentrates on a more simple line of action, rather then the complexity he offers here. So that he can probe more deeply into either his characters or into those matters of social and political justice that Mikael writes about. And that so fascinated Larsson in his original novels. (September, 2018)

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh

How witty and tongue-in-cheek can one get? This is a delightful novel written in 1938. It is a satire on the field of journalism, conveyed through the experiences of William Boot, a naive nature writer with no ambition who is hired in error as a foreign correspondent by the Daily Beast (now I know what inspired Tina Brown) and then sent to the fictional east African country of Ishmaelia.

The confusion begins when William Boot is contacted instead of fiction writer John Boot by the foreign editor, Salter, and the managing editor, both incomptents who are beholden to their authoritarian publisher, Lord Copper. The confusion lasts until the very end, when John is rewarded instead of William and Uncle Theodore is accepted to replace William.

But not only are the Beast people incompetent, so are the competing papers and fellow foreign correspondents that William meets in Ishmaelia. These correspondents are easily road-blocked and then sent on wild-goose chases by the local government of Ishmaelia, whose own actions are arbitrary and incompetent. Waugh, of course, is having fun with all of these people—with London society which fumbles it influences, with the newspaper editors out to please their boss, with the gullible foreign correspondents, and with the doctrinaire Ishmaelia government, a country run by one family, the Jacksons.

Some today will look back at the description of the men who run this country, and accuse Waugh of racism. Actually, however, he is having the same fun with these incompetent blacks as he is with London society and the journalistic profession. Such satire in those days, the thirties, was acceptable; but we look at such matters differently today.

The bitterest comment on the press is when both the bosses and the correspondents think that nothing is happening in Ishmaelia, so they had better come up with something to justify their time there. William, however, is too naive to understand this, and has to be taught by friendly companions both the hidden political life in that country and the meaning of the cables that he is receiving from his London bosses. Until the Scoop of the title—the scoop of what is really happening in Ishmaelia—has to be explained to him by others. A great example of his incompetence is when he meets the British ambassador and fails to inform him of what he has just learned about the plot against the Ishmaelia government—and fails to get his own resulting scoop in return.

This is Waugh at his finest, as he looks down on all these people, turning them into incompetent fools. It is perhaps characteristic of this author, who will later be revealed to be secure in his conservative faith, that here he writes with the smug attitude of a self-satisfied member of society. Unlike Greene.

Which may help to explain why Greene used his faith as the core of his early novels, because he had doubts about it; and these doubts provided the (internal) conflict that is at the heart of literature. Whereas, since Waugh had no doubts about his faith, he turned to society for his subject matter. And so, where Greene is deeply involved with his characters, Waugh is quite aloof.

The greatest fun with this novel is at the beginning, when the confusion sends the unprepared William to Africa, and at the end, when the Beast tries to reward him for his success. My favorite scene, in fact, is at the end, when Salter travels to rural England to William’s home in order to persuade him to continue working for the Beast and to attend Lord Copper’s banquet in his honor. His hike from the railroad station, his arrival unkempt (the family thinks he is drunk), and his meeting of this eccentric family—all this is delightful, Waugh’s devastating portrait of rural English society.

William’s success abroad is, of course, none of his doing. The result is a lot of byways in the early portion of his travels in Ishmaelia; and it slows the novel until the revolutionary activity is revealed. In the meantime, we are introduced to Katchen, a Polish girl without a country who is married (sort of) to a German who has disappeared into the interior of Ishmaelia.

Katchen is the “love” interest for William, who thinks he loves her but is not really interested in love. Neither is she, of course, except to get the Beast’s money she can finagle through William. Interest picks up when her husband returns, and they escape uproariously in a canoe William gives them. Her presence works, however, because her husband is involved in the search for minerals that interests both the Germans and the Russians and motivates the basic story, their attempts to take over the government of Ishmaelia.

And then there is the mysterious “Baldwin,” who travels incognito with William on his way to Africa, is helped by William, and then parachutes into Ishmaelia to save the day for the government—and William. He also provides an opportunity for Waugh, through exaggeration, to needle the Soviets.

Waugh spent time in Africa covering the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and this novel is said to be inspired by that experience. Further speculation relates many of these fictional characters to real journalists, from Lord Beaverbrook (Lord Copper) to John Gunther (Jakes).

Waugh wraps up the fate of his various characters in the final two pages. It is clever and somewhat arbitrary, but it works, not least because it is in keeping with the aloof style of the rest of the novel.

To sum up, this is marvelous Waugh—to be appreciated especially by journalists, who are the victims of his satire. But he spreads the satire all around: to politicians, to high society, to publishers, to empire builders, to dictators, even to the Communists. The work is both witty and funny, witty in style, funny in subject matter. And most of all, its characters act believably even as they act deviously or stupidly. The naïve William is truly three-dimensional. The remaining characters are not, but they are alive on these pages because they are so incompetent. (June, 2013)