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.

The End

Do you always get there? Or are you the kind who has no problems abandoning a book half-way through?

So, to which author falls the distinction of having written a book that heads the list of the top five most abandoned – as in left unread till the end – titles? I am sure it will come as a shock for you to learn that it is none other than J.K. Rowling. But before you keel over, let me tell it is not for her Harry Potter series, but for the first ‘grown-up’ book she wrote. And the top reason people gave for abandoning The Casual Vacancy? Well, it wasn’t exactly Harry Potter, was it?

Well, as someone who has never read a single word that Rowling ever wrote (I am sorry but all that magic-Muggles stuff is just lost on me), I am really not qualified to comment. But the next book on the list of top five most abandoned titles makes perfect sense to me. It is Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James, but more on that later.

After that, the list gets a bit mystifying. The next title that most people gave up on is Eat Pray Love (which I loved from the word go; and long before it became something of a cult book) on the grounds that the heroine was too ‘whiny’ and ‘self-obsessed’ followed by The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which many found too much of a slow starter to persist with.

Well, I don’t know about you but I firmly believe that when it comes to books, the world is divided into two kinds of people. The first group believes in the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ line and ploughs through to the (sometimes bitter) end while the second just wearily intones ‘Life is too short…” and gives up the moment boredom sets in.

Sadly, I happen to belong to the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ school so I have wasted years of my life battling through to the last page of books that were best left unfinished. But somehow, as far as I am concerned, to give up in the middle seems to smack of failure. And while at a rational level, I know that the failure is that of the writer and not mine, the reader’s, I am still reluctant to put the book away. So, there it lies, languishing on my bedside table, so that I can administer a sop to my uneasy conscience by reading a few pages every night before turning in. That way, at least, it serves a purpose: it puts me to sleep like no page-turner would.

Of late, though, I have begun to wonder if boring, unreadable books are really worth all that effort (not to mention the self-flagellation involved). The thought first crossed my mind when I tried to read Fifty Shades of Grey. Sado-masochistic bondage or Deviant Romances are not really my cup of coffee (I am more of a Regency Romance-Georgette Heyer kind of girl) but given that everyone was talking about it and that it behoves a columnist to be au fait with popular culture, I tried to give it a shot.

Honest to God, I tried. In fact, I tried three times to get beyond page 150 before throwing the book down in disgust and flouncing off to read something – anything! – else. No, it wasn’t the erotica that put me off (frankly, I didn’t find it the least bit erotic) but the sheer banality of it all. Not to mention the utterly execrable writing. (Though what really made me weep was the thought that this book had topped the best-selling charts and made its author a millionaire many times over.)

But I treated Fifty Shades of Grey as a one-off. It was just one of those freak books that you either loved or loathed; and I just happened to be one of those who loathed it.

That was before I downloaded Dan Brown’s Inferno on my Ipad before setting off on holiday. Now, I am the kind of person who loves long-haul flights for exactly one reason: you can read a nice, fat, fast-paced thriller uninterrupted for eight hours and, with a bit of luck, finish it in one greedy mouthful. And I had loved Dan Brown’s last page-turners, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol, so I thought I was all set for the flight.

Not quite. About ten minutes into the book, I was beginning to get worried. Half an hour later, I knew I was in serious trouble. There was no way I was wading through this bilge for the next seven hours. Well, not without losing the will to live. Which would be rather ironic given the plot of the novel: a mad scientist tries to infect the world with a deadly plague and succeeds. But then, it turns out that it’s not really a deadly plague after all…ah well, never mind.

Suffice it to say that it took me not eight hours, but five weeks to finish the book. And by the end, even I couldn’t quite figure out why I was persisting with the damn thing. I couldn’t be bothered about what happened next. I didn’t care if Professor Robert Langdon was finally killed off. Hell, I didn’t care if Dan Brown killed off the entire human race in his parallel universe.

But still, I persisted until the very last page. Only to ask myself why I had bothered. Maybe the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ argument has run its course and it is time to remember that life is, indeed, too short.