Peter Høeg's (1957-) Miss Smilla’s Feeling
for Snow (original Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne, 1992) is considered a masterpiece of ‘Nordic noir’ that helped to open a
new world of Scandinavian crime fiction to British readers. It was a bestseller
and won the Glass Key for the best Nordic crime novel in 1993 and the CWA
Silver Dagger award in 1994.
The book combines a plot and action of a thriller with political and philosophical
themes. A central one, that even the most inattentive reader cannot escape, is
the uneasy, colonial relationship between Denmark and Greenland. Smilla’s positive
and meaningful childhood memories of Greenland are set against sometimes
cutting comments about European attitudes and “that particularly Western mix of
greed and naїveté” (p316). Smilla’s view
is capsulated in her comment: “People don’t
say ‘I’m sorry’ in Greenlandic. I’ve never bothered to learn the phrase in
Danish.” (p238).
Perhaps this concern with colonialism together with the voyage
from the apparent European civilization of Copenhagen to the icy vastness of
Baffin Bay in the second part of the book, and Høeg’s interest in the human propensity
for greed and violence led John Williams to call Miss
Smilla’s Feeling for Snow “An
arctic tale worthy of Conrad” (quoted on the cover of the 1993 Flamingo paperback edition of the novel). No, sorry, Høeg is no Conrad.
Much of what in the early nineties may have appeared as exciting
‘literary qualities’ in a crime novel, now seem heavy-handed political polemics
and quite pedestrian philosophy. Like Smilla’s wardrobe [”a dinner jacket with
wide lapels of green silk. Black breeches that come to just below my knees,
green stockings, and green daisy duck shoes, and a little velvet fez (p191) and
a “white bow tie” (p192, see also pp5, 17)], Smilla’s pronouncements appear
dated and Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow
very much of its time.
This was Høeg’s second novel and, so far, his only crime novel. The story
is narrated by Smilla Jaspersen. She is single, thirty-seven years old and
lives in a block of flats, “the white cells” in Copenhagen (p5). She is financially supported by her wealthy father (p35). The story
begins when Smilla’s neighbour’s son, Isaiah, falls to his death from a
roof. Smilla does not believe the police
verdict of accidental death and she is determined to find out what really
happened. Her feelings for Isaiah are those of a lover:
“For an instant my yearning comes on like madness. If only
they would open the coffin for a moment and let me lie down beside his cold
little body …; if only I could just once feel his erection against my thigh, a
gesture of intimated, boundless eroticism, the beating of a moth’s wing against
my skin, the dark insects of happiness.” (p69)
In flashbacks, Smilla recalls her friendship with the boy. Isaiah,
as most reviews of the novel point out, is six years old when he dies
in December 1993 (I somehow managed to miss the mention of his age in the
narrative). “It is a day in August a year and a half earlier” when Smilla meets
him for the first time (p11). Smilla reads Euclid’s Elements with him (pp12-3), she buys him a knife (p48) and Isaiah
spends his time at the mechanic’s workshop - his box contains a harpoon, an
axe, a boat carved from wood and coloured glass stretched with a Bunsen burner
(p43). Later, it is critical for the plot that in 1991 (at the age of 4) Isaiah
accompanied his father on a polar expedition, stole and hid a piece of evidence
(p371) using a hollow wall and a suction cup (pp44-45), and jumped into icy
water after his father (p405).
Was Isaiah really only six years old when he died? Were the adults around
him just extremely relaxed about his safety?
In Miss Smilla’s
Feeling for Snow, there is much about the relationship between parents and
children, especially about the shortcomings of parents:
“I would try to understand the difference between growing up
in Denmark and growing up in Greenland, To comprehend the humiliating exhausting,
monotonous emotional dramas which European children and parents are bound
together in mutual hatred and dependence.” (p215; see also pp98-9, 161, 164-5,
179).
Smilla herself is the child of an Inuit mother and a Danish
father. This places her between the two worlds of Europe and
Greenland. Smilla is not at home in either world. In Copenhagen, “I have
arranged my apartment like a hotel room – without getting rid of the impression
that the person living here is in transit.” (p9) She cannot hunt like her
mother (p30) but has “a feeling of alienation towards nature.” (p31). At Isaiah’s funeral, she cannot take part in
the Greenlanders’ sorrow: “...no outsider could understand, no one who has not
grown up in Greenland. And even that might not be enough. Because I can’t
follow them, either.” (p4)
Clive Sinclair wrote in The
Independent (10 October 1993): “I
remain unconvinced by Hoeg's efforts to empathise with the Greenlanders. When
all is said and done I think he is more influenced by American movies than by
Inuit culture (the usual suspects are all here: big corporations, neo-Nazis,
drug-smugglers, mad scientists). Indeed, the book really comes to life in the
numerous passages which describe the shedding of blood, not the falling of
snow.”
This is a good summary of the plot. The novel has two distinct parts: Smilla's investigation into Isaiah's death in Copenhagen and an arctic journey to capture a mysterious and valuable
treasure. Along the way, there are some very effective scenes of extreme
violence (pp155, 264-5, 286-7). There are also an uncommon number of characters sharing the initial ‘L’: Lagermann, Loyen, Lübing, Licht, Lander, Lukas, as well as a mention of Marius Høeg, who died on a polar expedition in 1966 (p209).
The classic thriller plot is surrounded by padding of philosophical
statements. As the tale goes on, Smilla’s varied musings become increasingly tedious:
“Grief is a gift” (p10); “Nothing corrupts like happiness.” (p170), “Travelling
tends to magnify all human emotion.” (p258) “the engine is a distillation of
civilization.” (p283) “We live in a world of compressed juxtapositions.”
(p340). The last one occurs to Smilla while hiding in a bathroom for a
third time to avoid being discovered during a nocturnal spying mission. Smilla’s
internal monologue about the life, the universe and everything is in serious danger of
smothering the story.
Many of Smilla’s pronouncements relate to science: “Every
theoretical explanation is a reduction of intuition.” (p39) “To explain a phenomenon
is to distance yourself from it.” (p169). “Geometry exists as an innate
phenomenon in our consciousness.” (p263). Together, these scattered statements form some kind of a whole: Smilla is between an intuitive
(Greenlandic) and scientific (European) understanding of the world. Her feeling
for snow and ice, her sense of direction (pp7-8) and her knowledge of sinik (p278) are part of a Greenlandic
way of knowing the world. A western, fashionably post-modern (back in the nineties), view of the
world is summed up by Tørk Hviid in the novel: “What we discover in nature is
not really a matter of what exists: what we find is determined by our ability
to understand.” (p392).
Scientists, Smilla observes, are in loco parentis: when they lie, our “panic is that of a child who
for the first time catches his parents in a lie he had always suspected.”
(p375)
Høeg’s entry on the ‘Official Website of Denmark (Denmark.dk)
describes the novel as “a thriller critical of civilisation.” This sums up the book, which links up ideas
about the relationships between parents and children, scientific thought and
our understanding, colonialism, and our relationship with the planet. Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow is about
responsibility and authority on all these levels of human interaction,
from the most intimate to the most unfathomable.
Smilla comes across the concept of “Neocatastrophism” (pp159-60,
Tørk Hviid talks to Smilla about James Lovelock’s Gaia-theory (pp392-3). For
the Danish, with their oil platforms and mining companies, the planet is to be
exploited for financial gain, and the combined forces of science and business
are going to unleash the horror hidden in the frozen north for acquire fame
and financial gain. As one of the characters, Verlaine, puts it: “Human beings
are the parasites.” (p400).
In the end, Høeg's novel is smart enough not to offer any palliative narrative alternative: we do not get an Inuit guide to
good living. We are left with Miss Smilla, a woman struggling to find a way to live in the world. It is no coincidence,
surely, that the last scene resembles the end of Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley – another story of human desire
to master nature and to understand its workings. Perhaps the final words of Høeg’s novel make some sense after all: “There will
be no conclusion.”
