A long history of time

MAGIC realism, the critic's generic label for an imaginative style of fiction writing which merges fact and fancy, has a playfulness which often conceals political intent. A generation of South American writers and many African and Indian novelists have used it to attack repressive political regimes. Above all, magic realism defies time and logic, the narrative runs free, unencumbered by reality here, girls have green hair and youth lasts forever.

Interestingly, while there have been some fine efforts in the genre, such as Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Peter Carey's Illywhacker (1985) and Ben Okri's 1991 Booker Prize winner, The Famished Road, no magic realist novel has really surpassed the pioneering prototype, Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his astonishing One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967 English translation 1970).

Attempting to emulate the lightness of true magic realist writers can also prove unwise for others, as it does in the case of Peter Hoeg's laboured and unconvincing first novel, The History of Danish Dreams. It was first published in 1988, and the non Danish reading public might never have known exactly how bad a book this is but for the international success of Hoeg's quirky and wildly overrated blockbuster, Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow (1992 English translation 1993).

That was a thriller with a difference, having a tetchily disgruntled heroine with several personal hang ups and a professional interest in snow and ice. The plot meanders and fizzles out before the tale is quite told. Even so, it is a confident book. Its successor, Borderliners (1993 English translation 1995) is `a' clumsy polemic attacking the Danish education system. There is no disputing Hoeg's passion on the topic, but as fiction it is utterly unconvincing.

So weak is Borderliners that one approached The History of Danish Dreams with minimal expectations. It is, as its title implies, both a family story and a history of Denmark. Well, whatever about the haphazard story of four families, neither an account of Danish history nor even a sense of Denmark emerges from an artificial, over long narrative which drifts aimlessly.

Hoeg chooses to tell his tale through seven independent sequences linked by a cast of largely eccentric and for traumatised characters given to disappearing at various stages of their lives. It all begins on a great family estate presided over by the Count of Morkhoj an eccentric patriarch so, intent on defeating time that he has stopped all the clocks, thus enabling him and his household, he thinks, to live forever. Very quickly you find yourself thinking "This is supposed to be set in Denmark, not Marquez's Colombia." It is very derivative and awkwardly written. Of course there is a crippled aunt negotiating the expectedly vast house's "labyrinth of corridors and never ending suites of rooms on a black lacquered tricycle of complex construction" another character coughs up her soul, and a pregnancy last for six years. As the narrator remarks "Yes, you heard, right, six years."

Illiterate she may be, but Grandmother Teander, heading a clan which love clocks, establishes the nation's most influential newspaper which she runs from her house, predicting "births and deaths and suicides and bankrupt cries long before they took place, convincing the people of the town that their fates were in the hands' of a Providence with whom the old Lady obviously did business".

The love of clocks is important enter time, and so the narrative is forced towards the 20th century.

The theatricality, the predictable swings between the spiritual and the wanton, and the convoluted gags, could just about be tolerated were it not for the narrator's unnecessary and repetitive interventions which do not "supply information, but merely serve to remind us of his cloying presence.

Having trudged along for over 200 pages, the narrator, speaking of one of the characters, announces All things considered, we should all be grateful that this is not a novel." No kidding.

In one of the many odd conversations which reported throughout, one character is advised by another "I would like to warn you about something. I would like to warn you about James Joyce's novel Ulysses. It is one long, scandalous piece of verbal diarrhoea which is why I, myself, have never read it." There is nothing scandalous about Hoeg's flat, rambling, unoriginal, uninspired saga but it certainly does take a long time to go nowhere.