The Elephant Keeper's Children

Anyone lucky enough to have read Peter Høeg 's1990s bestseller Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow will already have pre-ordered their copy of The Elephant Keeper's Children, so this review is not for them: rather, it's for all those readers who haven't yet experienced Høeg's masterful blend of wry comedy and absurdist fabulism, ruffled by the occasional breath of icy Scandinavian noir.

The Elephant Keeper's Children is perhaps his most riotous book to date. The narrator, precocious fourteen-year-old Peter, lives on a tiny Danish island. His parents, the pastor and organist of the tiny parish church, are small-time con-artists with a history of fabricating miracles to strengthen their congregation's faith. When they unexpectedly go missing, Peter and his sister Tilde begin to realise that something very unusual indeed is going on. Their quest in search of their parents brings them into the orbit of a cast of deranged, grotesque and tragic characters; as Peter and Tilde get closer into the heart of the mystery, plots and conspiracies multiply towards a surprising and moving denouement.

All Høeg's gifts are on show here: his sense of the comic and ridiculous, his empathy, his inventiveness, and his talent for telling a cracking story. The Elephant Keepers' Children is just silly enough to be clever and just mad enough to make perfect sense.