Peter Høeg - Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow

The novel opened with an extremely gripping atmosphere of early Nordic noir. Set in Copenhagen it follows events after Smilla discovers the body of a young boy who lives in her complex, that it turns out, she has befriended. Smilla is not particularly outgoing, she's a stranger to Denmark, having grown up in colonial Greenland and she views the world through the eyes of a Greenlander, ignoring many European conventions, thinking differently and having an ear to closer to nature. It is perhaps this that leads her to suspect that her young friend has been murdered, and gradually, with the help of another person from the apartment, she begins to unpack a complex conspiracy.

The first half is gripping stuff. Peter Høeg blends the crime story with wider themes of Danish imperialism, colonial history and indigenous ideas and politics. It's well written and fun, and it was good to see the way that Høeg allows the reader to learn more about Smilla as the story progresses through flashback and the like. But, and it's a big but, the story comes apart quickly in the second half as the crime novel moves deeper into conspiracy and then a sea voyage to Greenland.

One of the delights of a good crime novel is that it came frame events around a seemingly minor event - the death of a person for instance. Then construct a believable world and wider conspiracy around this. Høeg constructs the context brilliantly, but the criminal story is just inadequate to the original crime and Smilla's investigation. The story grows off in random directions, characters come and go, and it all feels to unreal. This is exacerbated by the unsatisfactory ending.

This simply didn't work for me. The ending felt like an attempt to turn a crime story into an existential novel. It was so very disappointing. The book also has the single worst sex scene in the literature.