The Susan Effect

Peter Hoeg

Harvill Secker, £16.99

Review by Alasdair McKillop

PETER Hoeg has been praised for expanding the limits of the crime fiction genre by incorporating scientific and supernatural themes, and his new novel, The Susan Effect, will not to disappoint those who believe his past commendations were well earned. Others will consider it further evidence that he should focus on his agreeable ability to link the component parts of a story and maintain narrative momentum, in the process saving some material for his daydreams. The book moves eventfully towards its conclusion but doesn’t provide a convincing reason to emotionally invest in the main character’s scrabble for self-preservation.

Susan Svendsen is an experimental physicist and minor celebrity in Denmark. She doesn’t believe in psychology but has a theory about homes being living organisms, and her calling card is the size of a postcard because all her titles don’t fit on a normal one. "Over-achiever" would easily fit on a postage stamp if it weren’t important for her superiority to be carefully itemised. Susan’s husband, Laban, is a musician and as successful in his field as she is in hers. Their twins – one of each – are predictably precocious and just as predictably unlikeable. We are told about the individualism of each family member but they share a clinical smugness that deflects whatever attempts are being made to capture the reader’s affection. Despite being enthralled by the profundity of their insights into the human condition they struggle to muster a decent aphorism between them. And their problems don’t end there.

At the start of the book, Susan is under arrest on the Burmese border after attacking a man who tried to rape her. Laban is in trouble with the Indian mafia and the children are also in need of saving. Luckily, someone offers to save them all. A Danish government official called Thorkild Hegn appears on the scene with a hidden agenda in his hand luggage. He offers to tidy up the family’s mess if Susan can find out about the final meetings of a secretive body known as the Future Commission. It has a bad name and bad things happen to people who might be able to talk about its past business. Understandably, no one is keen to do so but this is where Susan comes in useful. Like a priest sweating truth serum, she can compel people to divulge their secrets. Susan calls this talent the Effect.

The Susan Effect was published in Denmark three years ago and has been translated into English by Martin Aiken. Even with the best intentions, something will inevitably be lost in the process but that doesn’t excuse the clumsiness of some of the writing. It does, however, complicate the process of apportioning blame for lines such as: “he simply possessed solid experience to the effect that there could only ever be one outcome of anything to which he put his hand”. Then there’s this reference to Susan’s university students: “Like the rest of us, their identities are uniquely fixed by their civil registration numbers in tandem with the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom that states that it can always be established whether an element belongs to the set or not.” Someone needs to take the rap for that one. I know which way I’m leaning but lean is all I can do. It bears repeating that Hoeg knows how to assemble a pacy thriller, but he is less adept at characterisation. Susan’s personality is essentially that of Smilla Jaspersen, the heroine of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, downloaded into a new body. Detecting the differences between the two would require the sort of high tech scientific equipment they would both be qualified to use.

The Susan Effect is essentially a police procedural without a cop and the solemn tone it requires makes the science fiction flourishes unintentionally comic, thus proving that expanding the boundaries of the genre is one thing but not necessarily the same as proving it can comfortably accommodate anything extra. “I’m three metres from the excavator”, Susan reports at one point. “At that distance, the Effect can be very intense.”

By the end of the book, Susan has uncovered a global conspiracy and some secrets from her past. But this thought lingers: it would have been so much more fun if she’d been a parochially ambitious small town gossip monger scheming to bring down the local mayor.

Peter Hoeg is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 17