Copenhagen's Clown

The author of "Smilla's Sense of Snow" produces a philosophical thriller.

(Photo Illustration By Beth Broadwater; Penny Tweedie/alamy (Nun At Convent); Christine Vovakes (Clown); Lucian Perkins/the Washington Post (Young Girl))

THE QUIET GIRL

By Peter Hoeg

Translated from the Danish by Nadia Christensen

Farrar Straus Giroux. 408 pp. $26

Kasper Krone, the unlikely hero of Peter Hoeg's new thriller, is a clown. The Quiet Girl, set in a contemporary Copenhagen shaken by earthquake and flood, is an equally unlikely page-turner: the thriller as philosophical novel and postmodern comedy.

Conventionally, a thriller is a mystery on speed, accelerated with conspiracy, incident and plot twists solved at the end by the hero's wit, ingenuity and courage. He has to exceed the ordinary man's physical limits: run faster, leap higher, fight harder. There's usually a damsel in distress, a tangled and -- these days -- technological maze to negotiate, exotic locales, a whiff of the elegant life and a series of obstacles involving men with guns. Think James Bond, Jack Ryan, Jack Bauer.

And then there's Kasper, who is not just any clown, but an international star performing in circuses across Europe and the United States. His act includes the pathos of the violin and the music of Bach. Able to quote from Kierkegaard or Ecclesiastes as the occasion warrants, Kasper is erudite, self-confident, enchanting and vegetarian. The scenes where he finagles his way past security guards, secretaries and other gatekeepers -- particularly women -- are breathtaking in their audacity and humor.

His dark side, however, sets the action in motion. Gambling debts, unpaid bills and tax evasion have caught up with him, and bureaucrats from Denmark and Spain threaten to have him thrown in jail. Coming to his rescue is an order of nuns, willing to negotiate a settlement and seek a pardon in exchange for his help with a group of unusual children gathered under their care. He is called in to help because, in the surreal world of this novel, God, whom he refers to as SheAlmighty, "had tuned each person in a musical key, and Kasper could hear it." Not only do people have a kind of aural signature, but life itself is a great symphony, composed by SheAlmighty, inaudible to all but Kasper.

The children under the nuns' protection are able to manipulate their aural aura in strange and significant ways. When acting in harmony, they can create a power strong enough to move extremely large objects. The Byzantine forces of good and evil, particularly the shadowy Konon Corporation, want to channel that acoustic-kinesthetic energy, but only the clown can truly understand the mysterious power of the children.

When one of these children goes missing and is reported kidnapped, Kasper must find her. You can skate quickly on the surface of the story of his hunt for this quiet girl, laugh at his humor, the derring-do and cliffhanger movements, all the while feeling that Hoeg is deliberately overstating the case. Coincidence abounds. Credulity is stretched and snapped.

Late in the story, for example, Kasper, wheelchair-bound from a gunshot wound and a broken wrist, and his companions -- his father dying of cancer, his legless sidekick, his long lost but now returned lover and an African nun with a black belt in aikido -- sneak below Copenhagen's main sewage station to slide through pipes 200 feet under the harbor and into the evil Konon Corp.'s super-secure headquarters. The novel is stocked with nuns and thugs, real estate speculators, monks and tax collectors and dozens more who accelerate and add vivid color to the deliberately over-the-top plot.

But like the mystical music always there beyond our hearing, the essence of the novel hides within the object of Kasper's quest. The missing quiet girl, KlaraMaria, is an old soul in a 10-year-old body. She balances the frenzy and chaos of Kasper's life. Slowly, their short history unspools -- a shared meal, a car trip together, confessions of loneliness and dreams -- and a great love story is born, the true subject of The Quiet Girl, the love shared between a man and a child, platonic, unselfish and powerfully redemptive. "In the heart of every artist is a longing," Kasper says, "an empty space, something like SheAlmighty." The hero is on an existential quest, and through the feminine -- the quiet girl, the strange nuns, his erstwhile lover, his own fractured psyche -- he finds the answer to the riddle of love and faith.

That Hoeg splices together so many conventions should come as no surprise to readers of Smilla's Sense of Snow, which was his first novel to be published in English. Treat The Quiet Girl as a thriller, and you'll sprint happily to its unexpected and enigmatic ending. Treat the novel as a love story, and you may be surprised by the deep silence of its final pages. ¿

Keith Donohue is the author of the novel "The Stolen Child."