SOURCE: Bradley, John R. “Time and Time Again.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4802 (14 April 1995): 20.

In the following review of Borderliners, Bradley examines the influences of Charles Darwin, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust on the novel.

Borderliners is published in the wake of the huge success of Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (1993). The first book was a whodunit, while Borderliners is an intense psychological study of the self, but there are similarities between the two novels which point to Peter Høeg's central, recurring themes. Both narrators are social outsiders; both have an inveterate hatred of all forms of authority; and both are obsessed by vulnerable and victimized children. The difference in treatment of this last theme accounts for the difference in genre. Miss Smilla undergoes a geographical journey to search for the cause of the untimely death of her child companion. Peter, the narrator of Borderliners, is writing a...