[In the following review of Borderliners, Smith positively assesses the novel and finds that Høeg "writes with a sense of ambiguity that seems appropriate to the voice of the disturbed."]

Borderliners is Peter Høeg's second novel to appear in English translation. Written with extraordinary intellectual and creative energy, it explores the plight of three children caught within a rigorous and idealistic education system. Although not as accessible as Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, the sense that Høeg's writing is so passionately felt makes this a compelling and curiously moving work.

The "borderliners" of the title are society's "unaccountable children"—emotionally deprived orphans, abused and abusive infants, some with mental handicaps. At Biehl's Academy in 1971 they are the subject of an experiment to integrate abnormal children into a normal school (and society), with the hoped-for consequence of a drop in the crime rate and even, the narrator Peter posits, respect for scholarly virtues and world peace.

The school is run with military precision and police-state tactics. Time is the instrument of control. In this colossal plan, even God, associated by the pupils with Biehl, seems to be implicated.

Into this Orwellian world come three orphans of varying hope: Peter, Katarina, and tiny, terrifying August. Their quest is to discover the "plot" they sense behind the school and in so doing to disrupt and destroy it. Høeg's oblique narrative follows their fight with the school and their own experiment to "touch time", which is effected quite simply when they stop the school clock. Moving backwards and forwards through time, he details Peter's final escape and shows us the narrator writing up his researches into the school.

Høeg employs the strategy of the thriller, wrestling the reader into a narrative and psychological grip. Long before he reveals the horror of August's background, we sicken with suspense at the thought of what it might be. He writes with a sense of ambiguity that seems appropriate to the voice of the disturbed, so that for much of the first part the reader is vaguely troubled. What is happening and can this narrator be trusted? Added to this is Høeg's focus on the child. Children can be a powerfully emotive force in literature, and in Borderliners the violent, damaged child is almost heart-rendingly so. The quasireligious imagery that Peter takes from the educationalists—of bringing children from the dark into the light—enforces this sense of tragedy.

In Barbara Haveland's translation Høeg's writing is careful, controlled, and delicately wrought. He records Peter's experiences with wry, black humour and unsettling irony: recalling only the torture practised at one particular children's home, he apologises "One ought to have remembered more. But that was the only thing that had stuck." Høeg's skill only slips in his ponderous meditation on Time in the third section of the book.

His passion sparkles through the translation. One senses that, although Borderliners is about a special school and special children, it is also an indictment of all schools as children experience them. The sense of being watched but never listened to, of the need to occupy every minute, of the impossibility of grasping the theory behind certain practices, is familiar to any pupil anywhere.

Borderliners has already had some success in Denmark. Britain's current alarm at rising child crime and childhood mental illness may give Høeg's quietly devastating tale some potency here too.