Journey In Blue by Stig Dalager, trans John Mason

A chilly, lonely saga of the world's greatest writer of fairy tales

"It is from Denmark that all the cold blasts come that turn me to stone! They spit on me, trample me in the dust!"

These words, from a letter Hans Christian Andersen wrote to his friend Jette Wulff, are integral to the portrait of the great writer that Stig Dalager attempts in this novel. At the time, Andersen was in Paris hobnobbing with Hugo, Lamartine, Heine; all treated him as a genius. Balzac granted an audience and showered him with compliments. Meanwhile, in Denmark, journalists were ridiculing him, mocking his vanity on and off the page, sneering at his social ascent.

Yet this is by no means the whole picture. To non-Danish readers, the interest Andersen aroused, in the highest circles, soon after his arrival in Copenhagen as a precocious, eccentric 14-year-old is every bit as astonishing as the later hurtful invective. Famous people treated him, virtually from the beginning, as of the greatest potential, even though what he was writing was preposterously overambitious.

The Royal Theatre, and the king himself, approved expenditure on the education of this youth from a provincial background. It says a great deal for Danish critical opinion that when Andersen produced his first fairy tales, it saluted them (a few carpers excepted) as achievements of the rarest quality.

Yet Andersen's life was largely unhappy and lonely. Dalager presents it in chronological fragments, juxtaposed with passages exploring Andersen's mind as he lay dying, plied with morphine, at his friends' handsome house by the Oresund. The author permits himself no licence with facts, and draws much on Andersen's writings.

As it happens, the best new biography, by Jens Andersen, also makes use of novelistic methods. Dalager's approach is sparer, more interior. Jens Andersen's research has led him to consider his subject as primarily homosexual. The more cautious Dalager, who clearly doesn't, even omits from his account certain key - and documented - passions.

What gives Dalager's novel its real distinction is its picture of a lifelong apartness, with acceptance and love as unrealisable goals. The situation of the old man is foreshadowed many times in the life. Andersen never ceased to be, and to feel, the vulnerable outsider, and Dalager's accounts of his compulsive travelling have power. As Auden said about another great traveller and giver of delight, Edward Lear: through his wanderings the writer himself "became a land".