Palace intrigue of the highest order, conducted by courtiers and officials who will do anything to achieve their goals, makes this novel by Swedish author Per Olov Enquist both stimulating and thoroughly engrossing, and few who read it will fail to notice the similarities of the “normal” behavior one sees between these courtiers in their time and place and those “aides” or sycophants who surround other leaders of other countries in other times. The Danish court from 1768 – 1772 pulses with life as powerful personalities collide in their rush to fill the power vacuum resulting from the weakness of King Christian VII, a sensitive, half-mad 17-year-old boy, who married the innocent and unsuspecting Princess Caroline Mathilde, the 15-year-old sister of Britain’s King George III, just two years before the novel opens. When the young king becomes interested in the enlightened ideas of Voltaire and Diderot and is celebrated by these philosophers on a trip around the continent, his nervous and threatened court decides he needs a physician to disabuse him of these “follies.” What they never expect is that the physician they engage, Johann Friedrich Struensee from Germany, will quickly establish a strong and genuinely caring relationship with Christian, share his enlightened ideas, and eventually become the de facto king and lover of the young queen Caroline Mathilde.
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In The Elephant Keeper’s Children, Hoeg continues his focus on philosophy, this time dealing with the search for faith and meaning through an exploration of life and its parallel search for love and happiness – be it through Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism. He does this, not as the main focus of the novel, but as part of the backstory involving three children who are searching for their mother and father, who have disappeared. Their father is the pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark on the island of Fino, where they all live, and their mother, the organist, is a mechanical genius with a gift for invention beyond what anyone in their congregation can imagine. The result is a farcical, picaresque story of chases and escapes in which the fourteen-year-old main character (named, in typical Hoeg fashion, Peter, suggesting issues the character might have in common with those of the author, on some level), along with his sixteen-year-old sister Tilde and terrier dog Basker, sets out to find their parents, sometimes aided by Hans, their older brother who is studying away from home. They know they must find their parents themselves before they are remanded to a children’s home by adults who seem to fear what they might do if left alone.
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Readers who enjoyed Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s first mystery to be translated into English, The Keeper of Lost Causes, which I found “as close to perfect as a mystery can be,” will probably become as captivated by this second novel as they were by the first. The Absent One, however, is somewhat different in its focus from the first novel, spending less time on establishing the character of Detective Carl Morck, who has been assigned to run Department Q of the Copenhagen Police Headquarters. Morck described in the previous novel as “lazy, surly, morose, always bitching, and [constantly] treating his colleagues like crap,” has experienced the trauma of having one partner killed while another, the gentle, six-foot, nine-inch giant Hardy has ended up paralyzed from the neck down in a fight from which Morck himself escaped serious injury. He has always blamed himself for the terrible outcome and has had little interest in doing much of anything at work, as a result. This case concerns a group of friends whose relationship goes back to prep school. With one major exception, all have become immensely successful – and wealthy. The only female of the group disappeared long ago. As Morck, Assad, and Rose investigate, the female, Kimmie, is tracked by the rest of the gang, fearful of what she might reveal.
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As close to perfect as a mystery can get, Denmark’s #1 crime writer, Award-winning author Jussi Adler-Olsen’s first novel to be translated into English has something that will entertain everyone. Very exciting with a unique plot, and filled with characters with whom the reader will identify, the novel is complex but not so dependent on odd details that the reader gets lost in complications, genuinely heart breaking in places without being sentimental, warm, and often very funny, to top it off. As fun to read as the novel is, Adler-Olsen also has something to say about contemporary life, creating an underlying thematic structure which carries a powerful kick as the novel comes to its conclusion. Who could want more than that? The first of his four Department Q novels to be translated into English, this is the beginning of a remarkable new series which has sold over a million copies in Denmark, which has a total population of only 5.5 million people.
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In the second novel of the Copenhagen Quartet to be published in the US, American expatriate Thomas E. Kennedy shows his immense versatility, writing a totally different kind of novel from In The Company of Angels (2010), the first novel of the quartet. In this new novel, Kennedy provides a vision of a different side of Copenhagen in a different style of writing, broadening his overall themes and his depiction of this city. Though no less serious in terms of its themes, Falling Sideways focuses on the business world of one company, a world writ small, instead of the world in its grandest terms, thematically. Though it is sometimes termed a satire, this novel is less a satire than it is a dark commentary on the shallow and self-absorbed lives of the employees of “the Tank” as they navigate the shoals of big business during difficult economic times. Here Kennedy uses the business framework to establish a set of characters whose business lives become part and parcel of their personal lives, with the two different aspects of their lives so intertwined that the characters fail to grow or even recognize who they really are.
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