The Quiet Girl Runs off at the Mouth but Can't Find the Right Words

Peter Hoeg can’t be accused of lacking ambition. The Quiet Girl, the Danish novelist’s fifth novel, takes on a multitude of weighty spiritual and philosophical concerns in the form of a clunky political thriller that centers on an aging clown with intimacy issues and mystical acoustic powers. Yet, unlike his critically lauded earlier novels, the premise of The Quiet Girl turns out to be as dubious as it sounds.

The garbled plot goes something like this: Kasper Krone, the aforementioned aging clown, is called to aid an order of ass-kicking nuns in the search for missing children who also have vague supernatural powers. The novel’s title refers to the enigmatic silence that surrounds these children, which is unlike the ordinary psychological noise produced by everyone else. The kids are causing trouble for sinister Danish government agencies involved with real estate and natural disasters. Appearances are made by the usual suspects—the greedy capitalist villain, the humbly heroic policeman, and the wise, gnomic religious leaders.

But this bureaucratic tangle is somewhat beside the point. Hoeg is more interested in a subplot concerning an ex-lover of Kasper’s and, unfortunately, in dispensing Kasper’s prodigious insights on everything from women (“femininity is an ocean; even if one has both a life jacket and a preserver, the risk of drowning is overwhelming”) to Africa, as embodied by a single nun referred to throughout only as “the African,” and memorably described by Kasper as sounding “exotic, like drums from a tropical jungle, and also deep breathing, like a blacksmith’s bellows.” Kasper utters gems like these on nearly every page, and it’s amusing until it becomes evident how seriously both Hoeg and his protagonist take these pseudo-profundities.

Hoeg uses his mystical conceit as an excuse for sluggish writing all too frequently. In just one example of many, Kasper repeatedly “hears compassion” in a room or person, and Hoeg seems to feel that this meager description suffices to make the clown’s talent come alive. But it’s that weary writing class axiom all over again—please, Mr. Hoeg, “show, don’t tell.”

Obviously the problem is not that Hoeg chose to inflect the novel with a kind of spiritual magical realism. That’s of course been done—and done well—by Bulgakov, Marquez, and Rushdie, to name a few. Hoeg simply hasn’t imbued his vision that essentially the whole world is one endless complex symphony constantly being created by “SheAlmighty” with enough life to make it as coherent and provocative as it sometimes hints it could be. Kasper tells his beloved that the self “exists only because your ears continue to isolate the same little refrain from the collected mass of sound ... again and again it plays our bank account numbers, our childhood memories, our PIN numbers, the sound of our mother’s and father’s voices.” The idea that the fragmentation of the world is illusory, that everything is complexly woven of the same fabric of reality, is not a new one, but Hoeg might have explored it in a more interesting way. Instead, after some 400 pages, Kasper’s “freak” talent feels too much like an empty quirk. No need to give the anti-climactic events of the last hundred pages away—suffice it to say that under the pressure of needing to hear the other side of “forty square feet of stainless-steel armor plate,” Kasper can, indeed, perform.

With a better translation and less bloated self-importance, Hoeg is a fascinating, agile writer. If only he had been less enamored of the psyche of his uber-macho, spiritual fool and instead focused on the subversive form and language notable in his previous works, The Quiet Girl might have had some truly wise things to say.