[Morley is a British novelist, translator, and critic. In the following positive review of The History of Danish Dreams, he compares Høeg's writing to that of such writers as Milan Kundera, Selma Lagerlof, and Hans Christian Andersen.]

If books could be assigned geometrical shapes (an idea that Smilla, the heroine of Smilla's Sense of Snow, with her feeling not only for snow but for higher mathematics, would surely have endorsed), then Peter Hoeg's new novel, actually his first, might be viewed as a pyramid. The History of Danish Dreams has a tripartite structure. Part 1, the base, establishes the story of four Danish families over almost exactly four centuries, from 1520 to 1918. The middle is inhabited by two families, descendants of those on whose shoulders they are standing. The already sharply attenuated shape of the pyramid reflects the much briefer interval of time it represents, a mere 20 years between the end of one war and the beginning of the next. At the top live the descendants of the descendants, merged as a single family.

A writer who chooses to make his debut with a novel that opens in the manorial-patriarchal environment of feudalism; that roams on to encompass the nouveau riche ambitions of the rising bourgeoisie in the 19th century; that peers into lost souls whose desolation exercises the Danish evangelical mission at the turn of the century; that evokes the gaudy extravagance of the 1920's and the threadbare existence of the 1930's before dissolving them both in the postindustrial welfare state society of late 20th-century Scandinavia—such a writer will be flailing and panting for breath after 350 pages unless he keeps a tight grip on his subject. It is a mark of the debutant Hoeg's confidence that he makes the attempt and a mark of his skill that for much of the time he succeeds.

In the opening chapters, with their self-conscious epigraphs, "Time that stands still" and "Time that passes," Mr. Hoeg is experimenting with style. At first he seems drawn to the magic realism of a Gabriel Garcia Márquez, but his contrived medieval stage props creak with the brittle sound of pastiche.

Next, he flirts with the conceptual structures of a Milan Kundera, the mode of ironic self-quotation, but conceptualism is not Mr. Hoeg's idiom either. He is a storyteller, and eventually he discovers the local traditions of Selma Lagerlof, Johannes Jensen and Hans Christian Andersen, which serve him best—legends tinged with romantic melancholy, fictitious biographies, tall tales told with zest in bold lines. Mr. Hoeg's contribution to this kind of story-telling is his tongue-in-check humor, notably his lively sense of the absurd. It was these qualities, along with the newness of the Arctic world as a backdrop to modern fiction, that made Smilla's Sense of Snow an international best seller.

The dreams of the title—more broadly, the stuff of human hopes and disappointments—are many, both abstract and specific. They range from socialism and evangelical redemption to dreams of the circus, of the Orient, of being thin. Individual characters embody the dreams, but it is an aspect of Mr. Hoeg's storytelling that the dreams manage to come more alive than the characters. The people in the book never fully emerge from the bas-relief story panel in which they figure—they seem to be there to illustrate. The narrator talks about them; they do not project their own existence from the page.

About halfway through the novel Mr. Hoeg hits his stride. Perhaps this is because he is more interesting writing about rich people than poor, about masters rather than their servants, about booming aristocratic eccentrics rather than cowed civil servants or tight-lipped, self-effacing bourgeoisie. At the fast pace at which Mr. Hoeg's prose likes to bound along, and with the high-altitude air his fiction likes to breathe, such people thrive. Thus his portrait, or caricature, of the between-the-wars extravaganza of a marriage between the tycoon Carl Laurids and the anorexic Amelie, who transforms herself into a man-eating whore and dragon of a mother after Carl Laurids absconds, is a very fine piece of imaginative writing. The 90 pages of this section—about one-quarter of The History of Danish Dreams—are utterly absorbing.