In “The Verdict of the Right Honourable Ignatio Landstad Rasker, Lord Chief Justice,” Peter Høeg patiently uncovers the secret that has riven an eminent Danish family. On his son's wedding day, the homophobic, lugubrious Hektor recounts the events of twenty-two years earlier, when the family's ordered world was wrecked by the decision of his father, Ignatio, to abscond with a Wildean novelist imprisoned for offences against public decency. While its account of a man “straight-backed and crystal clear and deep as a well” gradually discovering his true nature is undoubtedly poignant, the triumph of the piece is its structure. Used throughout Tales of the Night, the device of stories within stories is here extended until Høeg creates the literary equivalent of a matrioshka doll, perfectly suited to a tale with “a core of mysterious grief,” in which Ignatio's repressed homosexuality is sublimated in his hobby of ships in bottles, described by Hektor as “odd, solidified bubbles surrounding something flighty and tawdry.” So the Lord Chief Justice's testimony (which itself includes a tale told to Ignatio by the writer) appears within the tale Hektor is relating—the story's narrator informs us—after Thomas Landstad Rasker's nuptials. The concomitant use of double quotation marks within single quotation marks within double quotation marks alone is more disorientating than any of the other stories’ prolix digressions or scraps of magic realism.

“The Verdict of the Right Honourable Ignatio Lanstad Rasker” is the outstanding story of the eight pieces that make up Tales of the Night (first published in Denmark in 1990). No other tale is as wholly satisfying. All eight take place either on the same evening in March 1929 or refer back to that date as one significant to the central character. While the book's short preface announces their shared theme as love, they are as much a critique of a stolid Danish society, unmasking xenophobia, hypocrisy, insularity and arrogance, their cast of characters ranging from Charlotte Gabel—a frigid scientist attempting to prove the entropic nature of love—to Nikolaj Holmer, a merchant for whom “the part of the human heart not taken up with buying and selling remained … a closed book.” Høeg's assaults on bourgeois society, though lacking Swiftian bile, amount to a vigorous leitmotif in his work, from the attack on the Danish education system in Borderliners (1995, first published in Denmark in 1993) to his distaste for the Danes’ treatment of Greenlanders in Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1993; Denmark, 1992). The world of Høeg's tales is an atrophied one—marriages and relationships fail, careers gutter, the protagonists of “Homage to Bournonville” are emaciated figures hunched in a boat, “Pity for the Children of Vaden Town” describes a smallpox epidemic striking at children, while the different disciplines Høeg focuses on to anatomize his milieu—medicine, astronomy, drama, law—indicate a thoroughness the author himself might have chosen to satirize.

What is most disappointing about Tales of the Night is Høeg's handling of his material, the orotundity, the almost obsessional urge to detail, muffling rather than illuminating the work. The tendency was evident in his most successful book to date, though in that novel the descriptive pedantry could be attributed to Miss Smilla's character rather than authorial overwriting. Høeg's sentences, taken singly, demonstrate the writer's care, but their cumulative effect can be as enervated as the characters Høeg pillories. Quasi-fairy-stories, his tales share that genre's uniform pace, but lack its economy. One longs for the author to speed things up. For a writer who all but parodies Alistair Maclean in the latter stages of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, Høeg's handling of the imminent train wreck in this volume's first story, “Journey into a Dark Heart,” for example, is oddly muted: three antagonistic characters and a female guerrilla leader bound for a sabotaged bridge above a gorge in the Belgian Congo, resulting in a story largely given over to a debate among the passengers.

Like The History of Danish Dreams, its 1988 predecessor, Tales of the Night mixes fictional characters with historical figures, a mention of the explorer Knud Rasmussen in one tale, a supporting role for the physicist Niels Bohr in another. More striking, and a seeming attempt to establish a pedigree for the work, are the references to writers—Borges, Poe, Conrad (present in the title of the opening story and in its main character, Joseph), Hans Christian Andersen and Wilde—and traditional narratives, the Indian woman in “Portrait of a Marriage” saving herself from rape by telling stories night after night to a boatload of sailors, or the clown whistling at windows before leading the children of Vaden Town away from their parents. Karen Blixen, the most obvious precursor of Tales of the Night, is mentioned only on the flyleaf. Whether or not this acknowledgement is there to preempt a repeat of the recent fuss over Graham Swift's debt to William Faulkner, reminding the reader of a seminal voice like Blixen's is a risky strategy, for there is nothing in Høeg's collection as affecting as Peter and Rosa, nothing as fabulous as Babette's Feast. A scattering of witty scenes and one excellent forty-page story are hardly more than an appetizer.