Peter Høeg has placed himself firmly, not just in the Danish, but in the Western literary public eye. Seen from an aesthetic literary point of view, the four novels and one collection of short stories are not in the least similar to one another. A thematic analysis, however, tells a different story.
Common to Høeg´s books is their far-reaching critique of civilization; the approach might be different in the individual works, but they all point in the same direction. Høeg focuses on the price which apparently has to be paid as a necessary consequence of the process of civilization. The cost of progress, if you like.
In his first novel, The History of Danish Dreams (Forestilling om det tyvende århundrede 1988) parallels are drawn, by way of example, between the bourgeois culture of the individual and various neurotic disturbances and breaches.
Tales of the Night (Fortællinger om natten 1990) takes the modern dreams of, among other things, progress and expansion and unmasks them one by one, whilst in the contemporary novel Miss Smilla´s Feeling for Snow (Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne 1992) the critique of civilization reflects on differences in world pictures. By equipping his central figure with a dual cultural background, Høeg depicts Denmark as a society of administration and surveillance.
In Borderliners (De måske egnede 1993) sharp criticism is directed at Danish education policies of the 1970s. Here Høeg exposes how a certain view of people and development, which involves thorough surveillance and regimentation, is internalised in the consciousness and leads to severe psychological distress.
Despite unity of theme, Høeg´s books are all very distinct. In terms of genre and style they show very little similarity one with the other. This should be seen in relation to - and here we also have the author´s word for it - the fact that they are reworkings of certain literary traditions and disciplines. The first novel is written in the style of Latin-American magic realism - stories in a kind of neo-Gothic Karen Blixen pastiche. Smilla is an urban thriller with a - towards the end - touch of science fiction, and Borderliners is a school novel and a philosophical novel in one cover.
His novel The Woman and the Ape (Kvinden og aben 1996) is thematically a natural extension of his previous works. Again Høeg deals with the discord between nature and civilization and the alliance between scientists and money men. The Woman and the Ape is stylistically-speaking very flexible, but is best described as an eco-thriller with a multitude of riddles and clues, opportunities and revelations.
