Eat, Prey, Hate

I wanted to like it. I really did but when I finally got around to seeing the hit film of the summer, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the first thing that struck me was that it appeared to be called something completely different in its home language. Män som hatar kvinnor appears in the credits. If my knowledge of Swedish serves me right (and doesn’t it just serve me right!) that has nothing whatever to do with dragons or even tattoos, but means ‘The men who hate women’ or possibly ‘men are those who hate women’ (I discounted an early reading which involved hats).
Well, that’s me told, isn’t it? A no-nonsense title, that. Radical, separatist feminists might have worn that on button badges in the 1980s or spray-painted it on walls while they were coming home from their book groups where they read Valerie Solanas’ Manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men. Another popular book from that time was Misogynies, a cheery tome which urged women to creep up behind random men and shove them into the path of speeding trains. My heart sank. Was this film going to be a sequel to that? Would it turn out to be Exploding Misogynies 3: Total Annihilation?
Well, it did and it didn’t. It had at least one male character who failed to prove a woman-hater or a murderer, but just the one, mind you. Woe betide you if you’re the remotest bit kinky or fetishistic, though, because then it goes without saying that you’re a rapist and molester you evil pig bastard. You must be punished! Let’s just say it’s not exactly a sex-positive movie. Shortbus it ain’t.
However, in the end it was not its politics that made me twitch. I kept thinking: ‘I’ve seen this before. Where have I seen this?’ Now that really bugged me. This plot was very, very familiar, but how could it be? This was a brand new film of a fairly new book. It wasn’t until they got to the meatballs that it clicked.
No visit to Swedish furnishing giant Ikea is complete without a plate of meatballs, eh? Once you’ve got them rattling around inside you, it’s time to tour the hangar-sized sheds in search of home-assembly wardrobes. As our hero cooked his meatballs I realised that Ikea was the inspiration for the whole plot of Men Hate Women (as I intend to call it from now on). It is constructed from ready-mades, painted in bright colours and slotted together. But where did the pre-fabricated pieces come from? Two novels by another writer had been chopped up, put through the mincer, reconstituted into one big ball and cooked in sauce. Or, to put it another way, they had been disassembled, then screwed back together to make a massive walk-in closet instead of two perfectly formed cupboards.
The first of these source novels had the splendid title of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and the second was called The Skull beneath the Skin. Don’t know them? If you liked Men Hate Women then you’d love them. Come with me back to the 1970s... (Oh, and I should at this point, of course, say ‘Spoiler Alert!’)
Once upon a time, British crime-writer P.D. James decided to mess around with the idea of the gifted amateur, the likes of Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey, say. As an antidote to these untrained but infallible detectives, P.D. James created Cordelia Grey, a young secretary who inherits her boss’s private investigation firm when he commits suicide. Cordelia launches into her new career with gusto. Gifted she most certainly is, but her amateur bungling nearly costs her her own life and taxes the other players in the drama even dearer. Trying to clear up the trail of murder, mayhem, burning cars, destroyed families and ruined reputations at the end, Inspector Dalgliesh is convinced Cordelia was behind it all, but can’t pin a thing on her. No surprises there. He has only himself to blame. Who trained her boss when he was in the police? Dalgliesh did.
Amazingly, this was not Cordelia’s last case. In the second book she is hired as a bodyguard for a woman who goes to a mansion on an island and is in fear of her life from a murderer whose identity only she knows. On top form, Cordelia’s body-guarding skills are such that her poor client doesn’t even last the night.
What has this to do with Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, Men Hate Women? Maybe nothing, but there are some odd coincidences. Oh, one or two would have been nothing more than that - coincidence... but there are maybe a few more than one or two. Consider these plot snippets taken from Dame P.D. James’ two Cordelia Grey novels...
A detective is invited to find out who killed a rich and powerful man’s child many years ago (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). The killing took place on a small island where there was no access to the mainland. The island was a haunt of Nazis in the past and there had been at least one other death associated with them (The Skull beneath the Skin). The detective uncovers a vital clue in a strange coded message, found on the back page of a book the child once owned. It reveals the family secret that threatens everything (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). The detective finds a clue in a photograph of a crowd at a pageant. The detective thinks the murder victim must have seen someone in the crowd who wanted to be hidden and finds that the original photograph is missing. On visiting someone who has copy of a local newspaper with the photograph in it, the detective sees the rich man himself in amongst the crowd (The Skull beneath the Skin). There is a very serious attempt to kill the detective but, on escaping, the detective chases after the would-be murderer who leaps into a car, drives off at high speed and crashes, dying in the fire (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman)...
Starting to sound familiar? Meatballs repeating on you, eh? That’s right, it’s the entire plot of Men Hate Women, but it’s only now when I write it out that I see author Stieg Larsson had been very crafty in his borrowing... he’d done it in badger stripes! One bit of the first James’ book, then the second, then the first again... The actual ending of his story is less P.D. James and more Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister) but then Dame P.D. did tend to go for complex, morally fraught conclusions, so best to plunder someone else there.
The one original thing Larsson did was to divide Cordelia Grey into two separate characters, the girl with the dragon tattoo and the journalist, but they both come straight out of P.D. James. Mind you, I had to say I liked the new English title. The girl did, after all, have drag on. And it was tat, too.