[In the following review of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, McCue discusses the style and themes of Høeg's work.]

Every remove from safety makes us feel more reckless, abandoned. [In Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow,] Peter Høeg stretches the supply-lines of security so far that there seems no way back for the ice-maiden Smilla Jaspersen. She is a Greenlander, resettled in Denmark, which already makes her feel like a tightrope-walker "misunderstood by the person holding the rope". Forces which neither she nor the reader can fully comprehend propel her out into the arctic night, on an unregistered ship, on an illegal mission, with a press-gang of criminals, several of whom wish to kill her. In trying to find out what is going on, and why a young waif has died, she penetrates a forbidden part of the ship by travelling in a dumbwaiter, in which she is briefly trapped. It's not just bad weather and night-time; it's so bad that one would invite in a stranger, even an enemy, to sit by the fire; even an enemy's dog; even if it bit you. Smilla enjoys nobody's protection, but she will not give up her search for the truth, whatever the extremity of adversity.

The terrors are piled on, but Høeg is oblivious to the dangers to his narrative. For he writes like an escapologist. Smilla is as resourceful in the face of extinction as James Bond, and this story too has implausible, entertaining shifts—of gear, tone, direction, genre—whenever a premature ending has to be avoided. One of Smilla's special talents is her ability to flabbergast businessmen, policemen and hardened killers. When challenged by a mercenary tough, for instance, she hands over her booty. His resistance collapses when this turns out, randomly enough, to be a pair of knickers. The storyteller doesn't have to say exactly what happened next.

Another time, she is hiding in a shower when a naked sailor comes in to urinate in the basin, pursued by an apparently murderous woman.

holding a belt with the buckle down. When she strikes, she does it with such precision that only the buckle hits him, leaving a long white stripe across one buttock…. He takes hold of the sink, bends over, and urges his backside towards her. She strikes again; the buckle hits his other buttock. Romeo and Juliet come to mind. Europe has a long tradition of elegant rendezvous.

Homicide turns out to be sex-play; this moment of tension no more than a knockabout turn.

The tale is packed with such descriptions, a mass of details—those different sorts of ice—which yet never set the shifting scene. Melodrama and slapstick, epic journey and social indictment: the book proudly declines to limit itself. Early on, Smilla tries to retreat by barricading herself into her flat, with the phone disconnected.

This is the kind of day when you can't rule out the possibility of someone knocking on your windows. On the fifth floor.

Someone knocks on my window. Outside stands a green man. I open the window.

"I'm the window cleaner. I just wanted to warn you, so you don't go and take off your clothes."

He gives me a big smile. As if he were cleaning the windows by putting one pane at a time into his mouth.

"What the hell do you mean? Are you implying that you don't want to see me nude?"

In a story which generally asks to be taken seriously, these jokes are sprung in the most disconcerting way, as here, where even a train of thought ("the kind of day …") can be ambushed. But as events rush on, their significance is unexamined.

An expensive lawyer's office is being described with distaste. It has an extra-wide letter-box, "so that even the largest cheques can get through." For a moment this looks like comically bad translation; but no, the translation is excellent. How well rendered, for instance is Smilla's observation, in one threatening encounter, "of the division of labour between the two men. Verlaine taking care of the physical violence." The thug's pride in the way he breaks people is conveyed in that choice of "taking care"; and yet that is only the secondary, only the physical violence.

Selfishness, menace and systematic corruption form the fabric of this mysterious novel. Relationships are all based on suspicion, and love has to be "like a military operation" (one inventive manoeuvre has a particularly Scandinavian explicitness). Survival is for the richest and those with special skills, whether in classifying snow or sounds, in engineering or administering injections. Honed expertise even in violence, makes for a chilling, unreflecting efficiency. There is no such thing as society. Peter Høeg has a remarkable feeling for sinister surprises.