Stieg Larsson’s Sweden Is Entirely Dystopian

Andrew Brown reads Stieg Larsson’s novels and meditates on contemporary Sweden:

Crime fiction always exaggerates, and Swedish left-wing crime fiction, the tradition to which Larsson belongs, is a genre quite as stylised as Agatha Christie’s. There will always be villainous millionaires and noble women. It is not enough to be a sadistic serial killer: You have to vote conservative as well. But what has changed since the genre was invented in the 1960s by the husband and wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö is the overwhelming loss of confidence in the future, and in the state. This does reflect reality.

The story of Sweden over the last 50 years has been one of a steady loss of exceptionalism. In some ways the outside world has grown more “Swedish”—we all wear seatbelts, drink less, and believe in gender equality. At the same time, Sweden has grown much more worldly—it drinks more, works and earns less, and struggles with the assimilation of immigrants. The Swedes themselves no longer believe in a Swedish model, or, when they do, it’s very different from the heavily regulated “people’s home” of myth.