Smilla’s Sense of Snow
by Peter Høeg (Dell, Paperback)
by Margaret Smith
When we think of the suspense/espionage novel, the mind usually conjures up some geopolitical hotspot like Israel, Russia, or perhaps Northern Ireland, places populated by lots of Uzi-toting Tom Clancy-esque heavies. And in the midst of the screaming sirens, against bullet-pocked walls, stands some sly, mostly Anglo, sculpturally handsome guy in a London Fog raincoat.
Hard to imagine this kind of thing going on in a place like, oh, I don’t know, Greenland.
Remember Greenland? It was always the juggernaut in geography class. That big, chunky sort of ice cream cone-shaped thing floating around near the North Pole – was it part of Europe or North America? Who the frig lived there? Who would want to? And why would anyone write a novel about the place?
Enter Danish author Peter Høeg (I’m so glad I’m writing this so I don’t actually have to pronounce his name), and an astonishingly successful novel that has got some critics hailing Høeg as the next John LeCarré. And enter the novel’s heroine, no trenchcoated gunslinger, but a tiny, middle-aged, half-Eskimo, rapier-tongued, dressed-to-kill diva named Smilla Jaspersen.
Smilla lives in a tenement building in Copenhagen. Her neighbor, a small boy of Greenlandic heritage, falls to his death from the roof. Smilla is almost at once suspicious: in life, the boy was so deathly afraid of heights that something would have to scare him even more to drive him up there. And so begins her incredible and often terrifying odyssey to find out the truth, taking her from her modern Euro-metropolis to the glittering frozen expanse of her ancestral home in Greenland.
Much of Smilla’s search for clues also gives the reader many clues about this most complex and frighteningly convincing of characters. The daughter of an Inuit hunter woman and a Danish physician, Smilla is a tangle of personal and ethnic contradictions. The consummate isolationist, she becomes a central figure to so many lives: to the dead boy’s drug-addicted mother, to a lonely, dyslexic and intriguing mechanic, and to Danish authorities who would have Smilla murdered rather than let her discover the truth about the boy’s death. She is abrasive, callous and possessed of a tongue which reduces pretty stuck-up ballerinas and bullying male chauvinists to Slurpee. Yet she is alluring, sensual, and endowed with a compassion that will not let her forsake her investigation at any cost.
The backdrop to this tale is compelling and disturbing all on its own: Smilla’s Greenland is rife with apartheid-like conditions as the Danish government, which has controlled Greenland more or less since the Vikings landed there, lays out very different privileges for those of Danish descent versus those of the indigenous Inuit stock. The disparities are sometimes subtle, and sometimes cruelly overt.
With his laser-accurate and hypnotic use of language, Høeg gives us a stunning main character and a superb story that leaves the reader as breathless as the Arctic weather itself. He chisels out Greenland from its glacier-packed insignificance on the global front, and delivers it and its people with wit, passion and inescapable terror.
