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"THE WOMAN AND THE APE," by Peter Hoeg, translated by Barbara Haveland (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23, 261 pp.)
By Brigitte Frase, Special to Newsday
Readers can be grateful that Peter Hoeg is a restless man. In life, he's been a dancer, an actor, a fencer and a sailor. In fiction, he's already given dazzling performances in the epic family saga, the historical novel with side trips into fairytale, the philosophical novel, the comedy of manners, the novel of social satire, the novel of grim psychological realism and the crime thriller. All of that in just three books: "The History of Danish Dreams," "Smilla's Sense of Snow" and "Borderliners."
In this new novel, Mr. Hoeg adds science fiction and slapstick humor to his impressive repertoire. The unhappy and continually sloshed wife of a famous English behavioral scientist falls in love with Erasmus, a 300-pound ape belonging to a highly intelligent and hitherto unknown species of chimpanzee. With the help of the animal smugglers who'd brought the mysterious monkey to England in the first place, Madelene Burden rescues Erasmus from the garden room where her husband, Adam, has been conducting secret tests on him. Beauty and her Beast flee across roofs and treetops, pursued by Adam, who's gunning for the directorship of the London Zoo; his sister Andrea, who's the ambitious head of the Animal Welfare Association; Inspector Smailes of the veterinary police; and of course the television news crews.
Madelene, the sleeping princess roused from feminine helplessness and alcoholic stupor by passion and a sense of mission, turns into a wily, self-confident heroine who outwits her formidable adversaries at their own manipulative games. She's less imposing and original than the memorable Smilla, but more endearing; add her to the growing list of Mr. Hoeg's uncommonly well-drawn female characters. Part of his chameleon talent is that ability to invent women who seem real but are fascinatingly off-kilter in ways that expand both male and female fantasies of what an alluring, resourceful and charismatic woman is, and may possibly do.
I've loved following Peter Hoeg's experiments with style from book to book. In "The History of Danish Dreams," his first novel, he tried out sarcasm, irony, lyricism and the grand mythic voice, playing every manner to the manneristic hilt. In "Smilla's Sense of Snow" he wrote in a tense, deadpan, crime-thrilling style that occasionally opened into eerie philosophic moods. In "Borderliners" he confined himself inside a grim, flat, laconic voice: It's an interesting failure of a book because the modest ambitions of the contemporary psychologically realistic novel are all wrong for Mr. Hoeg's playful voice and curious mind. In his new novel he's figured out how to blend his various styles into a distinctive voice that's satiric, deadpan funny, at once warm and cool; it's a knowing tenor voice with delicious falsettos and growls in its range. "The Woman and the Ape" is great fun to read on a number of levels. It's a spoof of romance novels, a smart satire on current animal politics, an affectionate riff on dialogue as adversarial pas-de-deux on the model of crime writers such as Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, and a genuine philosophic novel. Mr. Hoeg has the narrative tone just right; his amused irony keeps a firm hold on the wild plot turns.
The love scenes between Madelene and Erasmus, which could easily have come off as either kinky or silly -- depending on how readers picture a small, pretty woman with a huge, hairy animal -- are both erotic and funny. One of their sexual idylls combines lovemaking with a language lesson. "They experienced a didactic breakthrough when Madelene reached the section dealing with the bawdy element in language ... and then Erasmus would speak without thinking first, then language broke through to him, and at that moment in the shade of the rhododendron bushes they were joined by the ghosts of Denmark's world-famous language teachers: Diderichsen, Hjelmslev, the glossematicians and the entire Copenhagen School of Linguistics."
Erasmus himself is an entirely plausible lover and gentleman, largely because Mr. Hoeg doesn't make the mistake of trying to get inside his head and humanize him. The ape keeps his mysterious otherness; even Madelene is aware that she can't fully understand him. He is the stranger among us, the visitor from an alien civilization, the intelligent and critical observer of our ways.
Peter Hoeg has written an intelligent novel of ideas and slyly disguised it as a light-hearted comedy. Through the predicament of a star-crossed, and species-crossed, pair of lovers, readers are invited to think about nature and civilization, myths of paradise and unspoiled innocence, timelessness and mutability, the relationship of humans to other animals. In search of a refuge, Madelene chooses the St. Francis Forest, a game preserve north of London created in the 16th century to imitate the Garden of Eden. Here is a place of both freedom and convenience, a catered and tended paradise. Madelene, a modern-day Candide, is slowly losing her illusions about wilderness. "The principle of the city -- modern civilization per se" enmeshed everything. That being the case, one might as well be practical, she realizes. Trying to escape from the destructiveness of technological civilization didn't mean one had to put up with "Mother Nature's exasperating lack of creature comforts." "The Woman and the Ape" has a delightful Voltairean effervescence to it. Like the 18th century philosophers, Peter Hoeg considers thinking to be enjoyable, and in his fiction practices philosophy as one of the lively arts.
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