Thoughts before reading: It’s got a family tree. I hate books with family trees. If I can’t remember who the characters are, you’re not doing your job properly, Author. Is that a typo I see? This book looks dense. I guess I’ll just borrow this one from Maddie and see how it goes.

Thoughts at page 90: This is is quite good. Bit draft-ish, which is not surprising considering Larsson passed away just after handing in the manuscripts for publication. The characters are totally insane. I’ve always loved a heroine with her own odd sense of morality outside that imposed by society, and Lisbeth Salander is exactly that. Odd, attractive, with a penchant for slogan t-shirts (‘Armageddon was yesterday – today we have a serious problem’), mistreated by a government welfare system that doesn’t understand her and governed by her own fierce independent intelligence, Salander is such a sympathetic character. I like Mikael Blomkvist, too: a journalist down in the dumps after being found guilty of libel. But of course, Larsson shows the depth of his integrity by making him the author of a book on the incompetence of Swedish financial journalists. This will be a pretty good ride.

Page 194: Hilarious Apple computer fetish. ‘Unsurprisingly she set her sights on the best available alternative: the new Apple PowerBook G4/1.0 GHz in an aluminium case with a PowerP.C. 7451 processor with an AltiVec Velocity BlueTooth and built-in C.D. and D.V.D burners.’ Also, quaint punctuation.

Page 201: There’s a section explaining the Swedish government’s social welfare protection system, which Salander is subject to as someone under the social and psychiatric guardianship of the state. It’s oddly placed and reads like a footnote, but it’s fascinating. There’s no doubt what Larsson thinks: ‘Taking away a person’s control of her own life – meaning her bank account – is one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose, especially when it applies to young people.’ It’s a sobering portrait of the weaknesses of the Scandinavian welfare states. Another thread that runs through the book is the cruelty of violence against women, represented through the vicious rape of Salander by someone who should be protecting her. Each part of the book begins with a statistic: ’18% of the women in Sweden have been threatened by a man’, and the original Swedish title of the book was ‘Women Who Hate Men’.

Page 470: Shit, what time is it? I can’t feel my legs.

Page 504: THIS IS AMAZING.

THE END: Nooooooooooo holy mother of Beatrice. That was SO GOOD. Bring on the next one.

‘I was wondering,’ said Lady Tamplin, again drawing her artistically pencilled brows together, ‘whether–oh, good morning, Chubby darling: are you going to play tennis? How nice!’

Chubby, thus addressed, smiled kindly at her, remarked perfunctorily, ‘How topping you look in that peach-coloured thing,’ and drifted past them and down the steps.

My first introduction to Georges Simenon was a Paris Review interview; I usually avoid these long, intimate and revealing pieces, as they’re guaranteed to make me chase the works of the profiled author, and my bookshelf requests respite, sometimes. But who wouldn’t be intrigued by a man who wrote 60-80 pages a day? This copy of The Blue Room was a lucky find at one of the City Library’s biannual book sales, where most everything is one dollar. Scoop-ups a-plenty. It’s in rather nasty condition, clearly having been the victim of a spill, but c’est la vie. I don’t generally read crime fiction, but I do like the occasional television crime show. So I’m not averse to the genre per se; I’m just usually much more focused on literary fiction. I like crime shows because they’re ‘hard fluff’ – you get your easy-to-pigeonhole characters, your souped-up logic and of course your predictable cathartic denouement, which is what a girl sometimes needs after a long day of shoe shopping.

The Blue Room didn’t quite adhere to these expectations. A little more interesting than your local cop show, it’s set in Saint-Justin-du-Loup, one of the many hamlets and villages of rural France where residents often have known no other home in all their lives. It opens with a conversation between two lovers:

‘Have I hurt you?’
‘No.’
‘Are you angry with me?’
‘No.’

These memories are rendered as replay in Tony Falcone’s mind, endless undertow troubling him while he is being questioned by psychiatrists and court officials. We only find out slowly what the crime is, and though it’s a slow-burning question, the crime itself is not the prime target of Simenon’s gaze. The reader is given front-row seats to the spectacle of the suspect’s torment – after a nicety sought by the judge during questioning: ‘This endless wrangling over words!’ In response to a line of questioning that would be thrown out even in the laissez-faire world of the American crime television franchises, we have ‘Tony, staring blindly into the Judge’s face…trying desperately to understand, to explain.’

In France, the criminal justice system is inquisitorial (rather than adversarial, as in Australia or the UK), and the judge’s wide-ranging, erosive questioning is compounded by the condemnation of the townspeople, whose propinquity explains their quickness to judge. Simenon maintains the pressure of these comparisons, describing the judge as a man not unlike Tony, a man who even likes Tony for who he is. It’s a quiet book which easily evokes the burden of trial by small town, as mild as it is utterly bewildering.

The Blue Room defied my baseless expectations of crime novels, though, granted, I don’t read many of those. It wasn’t a dense read, and did quench my thirst for lighter fare. But rather than just focus on gore or extreme personalities, though the latter certainly feature in the book, Simenon invites us to interrogate our opinions on culpability and traces the relationship between thoughtlessness and expectation: can we be guilty for the passions of others?