Fiction:Peter Høeg shot to international success in the 1990s with his second novel, billed as a literary thriller, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow. The novel was not a literary thriller in the traditional sense of combining poetical language with a suspenseful narrative - think Crime and Punishment, or The Name of the Rose - so much as the head of a literary novel stitched to the tail of a James Bond movie, writes Claire Kilroy.
The two halves could have been by the pen of different authors. Where the novel best succeeded was in its titular feeling for snow - the evocation of Danish snowscapes was striking and memorable.
After a 10-year absence from the literary scene, Høeg is back with what his publishers describe as a "philosophical thriller", The Quiet Girl. "Kaspar Krone, a world-renowned circus clown," reads the blurb, "is drafted into the service of a mysterious order of nuns who promise him reprieve from the international authorities in return for his help safeguarding a group of children with mystical abilities". Clowns, nuns, mystical children? Okey-dokey, I thought, with an equanimity that in retrospect amazes me.
Kasper's own mystical ability is that he can "access people's acoustic essence, especially children's". He discerns what key they are playing in, and extrapolates their psychological and moral state from it. It's a nifty device in a thriller - where usually each new character is introduced with a thumbnail portrait, Høeg deftly sketches them with an acoustic analysis, and thus keeps the action moving. Happy people are in a major key, sad people are in a minor one, and so on - it functions like a movie soundtrack, feeding the reader with clues. It's the rest of the novel that's the problem.
The protagonist, for a start. Kasper, we are told, is a "great artist". Clowning is depicted as a spiritual art, not an entertainment. The novel is littered with gnomic statements such as "Generalizations have an inhuman touch. But without them it is difficult, or perhaps impossible, for great clowns to create energy. The Savior also painted with broad brush strokes and plenty of tar on the palette." The Kasper-as-Christ theme provokes concern that something has been lost in the translation, that Kasper isn't a clown at all - Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow was also published as Smilla's Sense of Snow and the original translator disowned the text. But no, Kasper wears make-up and a comedy nose, does tumbles for audiences of children. He's a clown, all right.
THE SETTING IS poorly achieved, which is surprising for Høeg. Gone are the atmospheric evocations of Smilla. Copenhagen is depicted as a massive airport terminal. It could be any northern city by the sea.
The plot? Something to do with an evil property developer, Kain, kidnapping children who can predict earthquakes in order to make a financial killing. The Quiet Girl is a page-turner in that the reader turns the pages backwards as well as forwards, trying to figure out what they've missed. Høeg's prose is too clipped and portentous to bother with the housekeeping side of storytelling, such as identifying the speaker, or locating the scene in time. The action comprises a perpetual chase narrative that singularly fails to arrive at a destination, to the extent that, almost 300 pages in, one of the characters asks: "How many essentially identical barriers have you gotten past in basically the same way?" Ah, so the author has a grand plan - all this repetitive breaking and entering is working towards a greater end. If only. Høeg pauses to acknowledge the plot's staggering flaws, then blunders on obliviously.
The writing? Lazy. "The building seemed to float on the sea, like an island, or a very large ship." Islands don't float. Høeg could have changed it to iceberg. Every second page boasts a prose atrocity. "The female abdomen had always sounded to him like a bronze Tibetan singing bowl filled with fruit." A black nun, Sister Gloria, or "the African" as she is more usually referred to in the text, possesses a sexuality that has "the energy of an Olatunji drum solo, of a gnu trampling through the rain forest". Here's a corker describing Kasper's escape while disguised as a woman: "He delved deep into his femininity. Felt the ovaries." Felt the ovaries?
It is arrogant to expect a reader to plough through 400 pages of ponderous guff about "SheAlmighty" and the cosmos. Høeg repeatedly invokes profundity, as if Kasper's antics should command the reader's awed respect. "For a moment," he writes, "Kasper knew they were both looking into the source of the darkest demonic power, which the great enema syringe gives us all a dose of occasionally. The young man bore it for a moment, but then it became too much." It is a different class of writer altogether who can actually demonstrate the profound. It is possible that the whole novel is one big meta-textual joke - Høeg does choose a clown as his protagonist, after all. If this is the case, it is a very poorly executed joke, and pokes fun at nothing but itself. It is, in fact, an ordeal.
Claire Kilroy's second novel, Tenderwire, is published by Faber & Faber
The Quiet Girl By Peter Høeg, translated by Nadia Christensen Harvill Secker, 408pp. £16.00