[In the following review, Whittaker examines Høeg's use of dream imagery and portrayal of children in The History of Danish Dreams.]

Following the surprise success of his meditative thriller Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow and the critical acclaim for Borderliners, the word was that Peter Høeg's first novel—published in Denmark in 1988—was something special. With Harvill's new translation, we have a chance to see if the rumours were correct. The History of Danish Dreams is indeed an astonishingly mature debut. Tracing 400 years of Danish history through the interwoven generations of four families—the Laurids, Baks, Teanders and Jensens—it spans cultural and class divides as well as years with fantastical leaps and swoops.

We begin on the estate of the Morkhoj, where the mad Count (convinced the centre of the world is located on his land) stops the clocks and outlaws time in a doomed attempt to prevent change. Despite his best efforts, the walls of feudalism are finally breached and the 20th century begins, under the control of a hard and rapacious mercantile class. Personifying this class are Carl Laurids, born on New Year's eve 1900, and his son Carsten, who is willing to sell anything or anybody to get to the top.

Although we do follow the families down to the present, in which drug abuse and amoral drifting darken the idyll of Nordic cosiness or Hygge, there is much more here than a Scandinavian Aga Saga. Høeg's wonderfully cavalier approach subverts any notion of an arid factual plod: “History is always an invention, a fairy tale built on certain clues.”

There is a constant sense that Høeg has built his beautiful formal structure simply for the pleasure of running molehills and mineshafts beneath the foundations, gleefully undermining his own certainties. This is, as the narrator constantly reminds us, a history of Danish dreams. As in all dreams, everyday worries are to the fore but illusion and distortion reign supreme. While nothing in fiction is more depressing than fantastical whimsy, magical realism done as well as this redeems the genre. When Grandmother Teander, a newspaper owner, dictates the future by writing about it in her paper, or when the tenements containing the poor of Copenhagen slowly sink into the earth without anyone noticing, the reader is thrilled by the purpose of these imaginative pirouettes.

This is fantasy as social comment and—as with the best of Rushdie, Grass or Marquez—the author compounds the effect with subtle pleasures of character, language and sly wit.

A common thread through Høeg's novels is his damning critique of children's place in society; our imperfect understanding of their inner lives, and the damage that we do by shoehorning them into our adult systems. If there is a melancholic feel to his writing on children, there is also a deep anger, exemplified by the erosion of youthful idealism in Adonis Jensen—who “as a child, brought his father and mother much sorrow through his compassion for mankind.”

This is a vaultingly ambitious and hugely accomplished first novel whose success lies in delivering on its grandiose promises. With Miss Smilla and Borderliners, Peter Høeg amply demonstrated the depth and versatility of his talent. It only remains to say, eight years late, that The History of Danish Dreams heralds a writer who combines narrative scope and imaginative zest to breathtaking effect.