The Quiet Girl Peter Høeg Harvill Secker, 416pp, £16.99

Unsurprisingly, Peter Høeg's latest novel, The Quiet Girl, met with some hostility from Danish critics when it was published there last year. His novel Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow made him one of the very few Danish writers who are not simply "world famous in Denmark". But the closed, incestuous nature of the Danish literary establishment, and Høeg's refusal to be an active part of it, is part of the explanation of his subsequent fall from favour.

But there are other, more literary, reasons. As The Quiet Girl demonstrates, Høeg is an ambitious writer, and sometimes bites off more than he can chew. Not that he ever fails entirely, or ceases to be fascinating: The Quiet Girl remains an absorbing novel by one of the leading contemporary writers of the literary thriller. But it can only be read on its own terms.

For, finally, Høeg is not concerned with crimes and mysteries, though there are mysteries galore in this novel. As in Borderliners, the novel that followed Miss Smilla, Høeg writes about what lies on the borders of polite Danish discourse. He is not a political novelist, and yet his sensibility is particularly tuned to the marginal. The Quiet Girl is not just about Kasper Krone, a renowned circus clown who, dogged by taxation and other authorities, gets involved in investigating the disappearance of two mystically gifted children; it is also about hearing silence.

In a Denmark that is briskly moving along the highway of neoliberalist prosperity, Høeg wants to talk about people who are difficult to fit in: circus artists, tax evaders, nuns, migrants, "retarded" and gifted children. And, above all, he depicts a brisk and normal adult world that does not hesitate to hurt children for power or profit. Such stories expose the hidden underbelly of prosperous, ever-correct, "official" Denmark.

Even less to the critics's taste, Høeg's recent novels, and in particular The Quiet Girl, resonate with a deep spirituality, even mysticism, that has little to do with religion. Nothing is more calculated to disturb some people in a country that allows space only for mechanical religious practice, shorn of spirituality, or mechanical atheism, deprived of philosophy.

In reality, there is much to praise in the novel. Krone is a captivating, confused character, and minor figures, such as Franz Fieber, a handicapped circus car-acrobat, and Stina, Krone's former lover, linger in the memory. Without divulging the mystery, which remains gripping despite occasional hiccups, it is necessary to add that Høeg is concerned with how people connect or fail to connect; and also whether it is possible to hear something that cannot be heard.

The Quiet Girl is a novel haunted by hidden crimes - and by music and silence. The word "tone" is important to Krone, the troubled clown, the main protagonist and the reluctant detective. But the "tone" of the novel is chilly, the sort of coldness that cuts to the heart of those who cannot or do not belong in a confident, orderly, brisk and practical society. Perhaps you need to be a non-Dane in Denmark to read the silence in The Quiet Girl fully. Or perhaps everyone can hear the silence; perhaps it is only a question of trying, of listening.

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