All about the girl

What is it about flawed, damaged heroines that so fascinates us?

From the moment I encountered Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo, the first book of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, I fell hopelessly in love. Her punk-rock chic; her take-no-prisoners attitude; her complete refusal to let life keep her down; and, of course, her dragon tattoo: all of it added up to a fictional heroine like no other.

Target of an abusive father, child victim of a cruel social services system, rape survivor, Salander refused to let these knock-out punches cripple her. Instead, she reinvented herself as Wasp, the mother of all hackers, took diabolical revenge on those who had hurt her, and by the end of the third book has established herself as a reclusive millionaire who lives in the shadows, emerging only when it suits her.

For me, the appeal of Salander lay in the fact that she was the Ultimate Survivor. So I guess it was, in some way, inevitable that she should survive the death of Larsson and reappear in our lives (and our bookshelves) in The Girl In The Spider’s Web, the new book in the series, written by David Lagercrantz.

I am always a bit leery when other writers take over the task of telling the stories of characters that were invented by someone else. So it was with a certain amount of trepidation when I first started reading Lagercrantz. Could he possibly do justice to Stieg Larsson? Would his Salander have the same resonance?

Well, I am halfway through Spider’s Web and I am happy to report that Lagercrantz succeeds on both counts. Salander remains the same feisty if flawed character who captured our imagination when she first burst on to the literary scene. She has the same fierce intelligence, the same thirst for revenge, the same scary talent, and yes, the same demons that possessed her since she was a child. For all the damage – both physical and psychological – inflicted on her, she remains undaunted, picking herself off the floor time and again, and pressing on.

But as I read about her latest adventure, I began to wonder: what is it about damaged women in fiction that fascinates us so? Not the soppy heroines, who are always mooning over the hero. Not the good girls who never put a foot wrong. Not the fairy princesses who get their happily ever after. They are not the ones who resonate with us; on the contrary, they tend to fade from memory the moment you turn the page. It is the women with failings and flaws, the women with all the frailty and strength that characterizes the human condition, who never release their hold on our imagination.

A quick check with my friends threw up several names on this list. Patricia Cornwall’s Kay Scarpetta, who cut up dead bodies for a living; Catwoman, who is part jewel thief and part superheroine; Lady Macbeth, whose overweening ambition powers the play; Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent, who metamorphoses from a beautiful young woman to a terrible creature bent on revenge; Annalise Keating, the scary super-lawyer who knows all about How To Get Away With Murder.

All good choices. But my top five list looks a little different, presented here in chronological order:

·         Becky Sharp: The name says it all; this is a woman who has a sharp eye out for the main chance. In an age when a woman was judged by birth and money, Becky had neither. What she did have was beauty, wit, charm and drive. In William Makepeace Thackeray’s world, she was the anti-heroine, the fair symbol of vanity. In today’s world, she would have been running a multinational corporation.

·         Anna Karenina: The dissatisfied, bored wife is a fairly routine trope of fiction. But Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina rises above the banal with her passionate, if doomed, love for Count Vronsky. There is something infuriating about her at times, and there are occasions when you want to reach into the pages and give her a good shaking. But that’s only because you have become so invested in her story.

    Carrie Mathison: She’s a CIA analyst, she’s bipolar, she’s in love with the man she hunting down, she’s a mother with zero maternal feelings, she’s the only woman who can save the Homeland. Impossibly improbable scenario? Yes. But Clare Danes makes it work.

·         Amy Dunne: By the time you realize that she’s a full-on psycho, you have already succumbed to the charm of Amy. You stare in horrified fascination as she does the most unspeakable of things. And there’s a just tiny part of you that admires her for getting away with it.

·        Claire Underwood: As the ice-queen wife to the cold conniving Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Claire’s control on her emotions is as tight as the fitted dresses she wears. Played by Robin Wright in the American series, she is the Lady Macbeth of our times, all ruthless ambition and an eye to the main chance, but with just a soupcon of vulnerability that makes her a real character rather than a prototype.

Family matters

They can either make you or break you; or maybe do a little bit of both

Families. They are the best, aren’t they? The one bunch of people bound together by ties of blood or marriage, who stand by you no matter what.

The mother, who forgives her son his decades of neglect, because in her eyes he can do no wrong. The father who thinks nothing of liquidating his life savings so that his daughter can go to university abroad. The wife who stands silently by her husband in the worst of times because it would never occur to her to bail and run. The husband who spends months planning a surprise party for his wife as a landmark birthday approaches. The aunt who steps in when mom has passed on and the children need a mother figure in their lives. The kids who patiently explain how email and facetime works to their grandparents so that they can keep in touch even though they live thousands of miles apart. 

Oh yes, families are the best. Except, of course, when they are the worst.

And we know that they can be all kinds of worst. At the moment of this writing we seem to be gripped by the saga of the Mukerjea-Bora clan, peopled by absconding fathers, abandoned children, marriages, non-marriages and re-marriages, half-siblings, step-children, step-siblings, and more dysfunctional relationships that you can shake a stick at. And that’s before we get to the murder/disappearance of a beautiful young girl, poised at the cusp of what could have been a wonderful life full of love and happiness, with her mother/sister cast as the prime suspect. It’s heart-breaking stuff, no matter how the case actually pans out.

So, is it any wonder than no matter how hard we try, we simply can’t drag our eyes away from the car crash of a murder investigation that is re-run in slow motion every night on our TV screens? As we stare with horrified fascination at the sorry spectacle that unfolds before us at prime time, I am sure that all of us, in some corner of our hearts, are thanking our stars for our own relatively-uncomplicated family ties.

But as Leo Tolstoy wrote in the famous opening lines of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And when you look around – among your friends, neighbours, relatives, colleagues – it is hard to find even a dozen families that are really and truly happy.

Sure, they all tick the usual boxes. Dad has a great job. Mom works but not as hard as Dad, so that she can be home for the kids in the evening. Lovely house, sparkling with the care and attention bestowed upon it. Big cars to go on driving vacations. Kids who do well at school, and are good at tennis/piano/drama (take your pick). Parents who are part of the happy mix, shielded from the social isolation that often comes with old age. On the face of it, all of this builds up to a pretty picture.

But scratch the surface and – barring a few exceptions – the veneer of perfection cracks all too easily. Dad is coping with his mid-life crisis by having it off with the secretary (“You are only as young as the woman you feel,” he guffaws to his mates at the club). Mom is turning a blind eye to it in the hope it goes away, going through her days and nights anaesthetized with a combination of prescription pills and copious amounts of red wine. The kids, who in the manner of kids everywhere, see all but say nothing, seethe with a helpless anger against both parents. Oh, and as for the big house, Dad and his sister are locked in a deadly battle to ensure that the other sibling doesn’t end up inheriting it, though you’d never guess it from the lovely Rakhi messages they send to each other on their Facebook walls.

Unhappy families abound and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. There is the daughter who resents the fact that she always comes second-best to the son simply because she is a daughter, and carries that hard knot of sorrow/anger in her heart throughout her life. There is the mother-in-law who loathes the new daughter-in-law for the hold she has on her son. There is the wife who is fed up with her husband for his unquestioning obedience to his mother. There is the husband who can’t understand why his wife is always running home to Mummy at the slightest sign of trouble. There are parents who abandon their children. There are children who abandon their parents. And thus, the sorry circle goes.

Oh yes, families can be the absolute worst. Except, of course, when they are the best. There is the niece who turns up to keep vigil at the bedside of her childless uncle. There is the grandson who relocates so that he can spend time with his grandparents in their twilight years. There is the mother-in-law who donates her kidney to her daughter-in-law (don’t sneer; I have actually seen that happen).

I know which kind of family I would rather be a part of it. But alas, we all seem destined to have a little bit of both kinds in our lives. And, given the alternative, perhaps that’s not so bad.