Lessons of Literary Constructions

I've recently finished reading the final volume of Stieg Larsson's brilliant Millennium Trilogy, "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest". The Millennium series is now topping the best seller charts in Europe and the United States, causing some commentators to make comparisons with the Harry Potter books.

This comparison was particularly interesting for me because I'm also in the middle of "The Children's Book" by A S Byatt, written partly in ironic response to the kind of supernatural fiction popularised so successfully by J K Rowling.

I obtained my copies of "The Millennium Trilogy" and "The Children's Book" from Worcester's excellent city library, currently housed in a wonderful Victorian building, part of a larger civic legacy, some of which has now been re-developed for a city centre apartment block.

By co-incidence, a minor sub-plot of "The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest" involves the "outing" of a corrupt construction boss. Indeed Larsson's descriptions of the operation of the Swedish construction industry - not too different from our own - are quite fascinating. Larsson's life partner is an architect.

The subject of construction brings me back to Worcester City Library, for whom relocation plans are progressing as part of a larger building complex. As it happens, the firm selected to build this, under the Private Finance Initiative, has just been fined some £8 million by the Office of Fair Trading following an inquiry entitled "Bid Rigging in the Construction Industry".

This is a very interesting story* in itself ! For more information, please see :
http://www.oft.gov.uk/advice_and_resources/resource_base/ca98/decisions/bid_rigging_construction
However, a word of warning, in my own experience those who try to dig too deeply into such matters tend to be treated like naughty children and excluded by bossy bureaucrats.

* Unveiling the main findings of their investigation, the OFT stated that - as in Agatha Christie's "Murder on the Orient Express" - almost all potential suspects turned out to be involved. See also Financial Times Article of 22.9.09 "Web of wrongdoing that spanned an industry".