My little venture into the world of Scandinavian crime thrillers continued with Peter Høeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow. I almost didn't buy it because it had been made into a film which makes absolutely no sense because lots of fine books have been made into movies. (Not necessarily fine movies, mind you.) It's popularity just tainted it somehow for me. Luckily I overcame my knee-jerk reaction and picked it up because it's a fantastic novel.
My previous encounters with the genre were generally not afraid to set themselves during the winter when it was cold and there was snow. Høeg ups the ante here with his heroine Smilla Jasperson who grew up in Greenland and developed an unparalleled understanding of snow and ice. As an adult in Denmak she studied glacial morphology and mathematics. She could give you a lengthy lecture on SnoCones and how they interact with your tongue depending on the air temperature. Beyond examining glaciers, her talents prove handy when one of her neighbors – a boy who's all of about 8 years old named Isaiah – is found dead. He ran off the roof of their Copenhagen apartment building. Looking at the direction of the tracks and how Isaiah's feet left patterns in the snow, Smilla is convinced that it was no accident. She becomes convinced that the boy was chased off the roof. But why?
Isaiah and his mother Juliane are both Greenlandic. This resonates with Smilla as she is half Greenlandic with the other half being Danish. Clues slowly emerge. For instance, Juliane was being paid a monthly stipend by a Danish mining company because her husband had died in Greenland while on a job for it. Smilla also learns that once a month Isaiah was picked up by a stranger in a mysterious car and returned later that day. Isaiah's autopsy was done by a Professor Loyen, the director of the Institute for Arctic Medicine, instead of the usual pathologist. None of this adds up. Juliane shows Smilla the letter from the mining company announcing the stipend. There's a bit of marginalia which leads Smilla to Elsa Lubing, the company's former accountant, who proves sympathetic to Smilla's investigation despite being wrapped up in her religion. We find out about a gang of scientists who had worked for the mining company and had gone on secret missions to Greenland and who are plotting a return. Somehow Isaiah's fate is mixed up with them.
That's one half of the book. Intertwined with the mystery is Smilla. She is cold and dismissive. A misanthropic troublemaker. She grew up in Greenland with a native mother and Danish father. When her mother went out fishing one day and never came back, her father brought her back to Denmark. He's still alive and very wealthy. His wife is less than half his age. Unsurprisingly, Smilla resents him. Resents him for having taken her out of her element. The book is littered with flashbacks to Smilla's childhood in Greenland and asides which address human nature and Danish society. From the former we get a picture of a way of life that is both simpler and more complicated than that in Denmark. There are less people, less distractions, and no government bureaucracy. On the other hand, daily life is a struggle for survival. Smilla's mother was a strong and capable woman and she passed those qualities down to her daughter. Likewise Smilla gained a distrust of European culture from her mother who kept it at arms length. A pair of scissors or some thermal underwear were welcome intrusions from across the ocean but that's about it.
Any jabs that Høeg made at Denmark surely went over my head. Greenland is or was for a long time a commonwealth of Denmark. I know none of the details but racism on the part of the Danes towards Inuits or distrust the other way around is understandable. The details are lost on me but such general animosities make sense. Instead of impotently trying to understand Danish history, culture, and society, I took more note of instances where Smilla drew a distinction between Greenlandic culture vs. European. For example, she contrasts how the two deal with depression. For her, Europeans try to “work their way out of problems through action” while the Greenlandic way is to “submerge oneself in the dark mood”. Smilla feels that her native culture is more “pure” and the Inuit way of life less cluttered whereas Danes and perhaps Europeans more generally make things overly complicated by placing obstacles in the way of happiness and solutions to problems.
I was surprised (and pleasantly so) at how little Smilla changed over the course of 500 pages. She did warm up to her neighbor that she called The Mechanic to the point where she would let her guard down and indulge in the simple and necessary pleasure of human touch but she never, for lack of a better way of saying it, became a Dane. She could never accept the strange land to which her father brought her. Smilla remained a Greenlander. Perhaps this was Høeg being anti-colonial and saying that cultures shouldn't impose themselves on other cultures. On another level I just appreciated Smilla as a character who kept her anger behind a stoic facade. But I'm not sure why. It's just appeals to me – that kind of silent resistance. However, I should also add that she throws in a hefty down of physical resistance as well. I also feel that her self-righteousness gets dulled a bit as the book goes on or directed elsewhere, perhaps. It goes from being directed at the world generally to being targeted at specific evils – evils that any moral creature can point to, not merely the smug.
Høeg deftly wove a story that blended a mystery with a character study. The former was unwoven at a nice deliberate pace – he really strung me along. You don't find out the answers to all the questions until you're about 95% of the way through. The latter was intriguing as well with its flashbacks, commentary, and digressions on the nature of snow and ice. Smilla is something of an anti-hero with all of her flaws and contempt. It's hard to say if she pursued her intuition about Isaiah's death to get justice or to prove that she was right. Probably some of both.
On a related note, I watched the movie based on the book shortly after I had finished reading it and I can tell you it's for shite. Don't bother. The film gives away a sizable chunk of the mystery right at the beginning. What Høeg waited a few hundred pages to tell you what the movie gives away in the opening scene. Talk about TMI. Smilla's character isn't too bad here but most of her flashbacks are disposed with and those that remain reveal basically nothing of her internal life. She lies on a couch, thinks back to her childhood, and the audience is left on its own to figure out what it meant or what its significance is. They don't add up to character development.
As for the mystery, Høeg's slow pace is sped up and everything is condensed to the point where just about every character besides Smilla is simply Irving the Explainer. These people don't act as something to compare Smilla to. They exist simply to give her a piece of the puzzle with some characters in the film doing the work of a multiple characters in the book in a quarter of the time or less. We go from one meaningless cardboard cut out who puts a clue in our basket to the next.
Avoid the movie at all costs.
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