The illusionist

“There are two types of silence,” says Kasper Krone, a clown with a mystical talent who is the protagonist of “The Quiet Girl,” the latest novel by Peter Hoeg. “[O]r at least that’s how it has sounded to me. There is the high silence, the silence behind prayer. The silence when one is close to the Divine. The silence that is the dense, unborn presence of all sounds. And then there is the other silence. Hopelessly far from God. And from other people. The silence of absence. The silence of loneliness.”

Kasper, 42, hears -- no, feels -- musical chords in people and uses this gift to heal them. It is in this (quite lucrative) capacity that he meets 9-year-old KlaraMaria. “People make noise,” he explains. “Their bodies make noise. But so do their thoughts, their feelings. We all make noise. I hear very well, sort of like an animal, and it’s been that way ever since I was a child. It isn’t always fun; you can’t shut it out. It’s easiest when people are asleep. So I’m often awake at night.”

In one therapy-like session, ostensibly a kind of music lesson, KlaraMaria lets him know that she has been kidnapped and beaten by the man and woman who brought her to Kasper. Kasper is drawn to save the girl, primarily because of the silence at the center of her being. “I’ve been searching for that silence,” he tells her. “All my life.”

Hoeg, who has worked for years in commedia dell’arte theater, has likened writing to magic -- specifically, to the art of illusion. A trick requires an audience to make it whole. So does a novel. This is how Hoeg writes, like a carny with a shell game, and never, in all his novels, has it been more apparent than in “The Quiet Girl.” A reader simply must keep her wits about her; snooze for a minute, carelessly turn a page, and you will absolutely miss something. Something you need to solve the puzzle, to solve the crime. For it is crime fiction. Literary, yes, sky-high concept -- silence, spirituality, the powers of children, music -- but crime fiction, with all its mental acrobatics.

Many of Hoeg’s favorite themes are back: The unforgivable things we do to children (the subject of “Borderliners”), the inhuman horrors of bureaucracy (echoes of “The History of Danish Dreams”) and the terrifying strength of women (from “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” and “The Woman and the Ape”). The power of the human mind (the purer the better) to memorize the shape of keys, to triumph over time, to feel the music in the human body gives all of Hoeg’s novels a supernatural shimmer and the reader the impression that we can escape the various prisons created throughout history to control the human animal.

“What do you say to the idea that some children are born with a gift for coming close to God faster than others?” the head nun asks Kasper when he is finally able to locate the convent from which KlaraMaria has been kidnapped. With the nun’s blessing, he searches for the other children who had been living there and are now missing. All have the gift of silence.

Of course, this complicated story line is only one of the balls Hoeg juggles, one of the rings in this circus. Several bureaucracies want to export Kasper to Spain, where he will be tried for tax evasion and likely sent to prison. This story line allows Hoeg to show off his stunning skills as an acrobat, clown and illusionist as Kasper searches for the children. High-speed chases, fight scenes in public places and scary new ways to disarm attackers. This is the lion-taming ring.

In another ring, the high-wire act. Kasper Krone’s life, his childhood, his relationship with his father (his mother, an acrobat, was killed in a fall from a high wire) and his deep understanding of music provide a quiet backbone for the novel. “Harlequin can absorb an endless series of humiliations,” we learn. “He who is without pride is invulnerable.” Later, the author intercedes with characteristic terseness: “Many people have an incorrect image of clowns. They think that because a clown has a child’s sweetness he also has a child’s physique.

“Kasper hit him with the underside of his elbow, from below and upward. The man was unprepared for the blow, it pressed through his abdominal muscles and reached the lower tip of his lungs. He fell to his knees.” (The children, it turns out, are useful to the bad guys -- evil developers -- in predicting earthquakes.)

Kasper’s quest leads him through the Kafkaesque landscape of bureaucracies: hospitals, the Municipal Records Office, the Map and Land Registry Office, the Navigation and Hydrography Assn., to name just a few of the faceless organizations, with their security guards and procedures, that betray the false equanimity of modern democracy. Copenhagen and the Danish winter are also part of the precarious, nerve-wracking backdrop: “[T]he wind was from the north and it went straight through clothing and skin, deep into the body, where it wrapped itself around the heart and filled it with Siberian sadness.”

Hoeg’s writing is jewel-encrusted: “She walked like a sea horse swimming in an eighty-five-degree ocean, in time to a mambo beat that only she could hear,” or “He was imprisoned in her sound, locked in her fragrance, like the pit in a peach.” This is writing that sparkles to distract from its deep philosophical aspects. I will entertain you while I unnerve you, any novel by Peter Hoeg promises the reader. And makes good.

susan.reynolds@latimes.com