SOURCE: Miller, D. Quentin. “The Woman and the Ape.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (summer 1997): 273–74.

In the following review, Miller focuses on the interchangeability of Madeline and Erasmus in The Woman and the Ape.

Peter Høeg's fourth novel defies easy categorization. It is at once a tale of personal strength, a love story, and an ecological morality tale. To choose one of these or any other conventional label to describe The Woman and the Ape is to ignore its obvious unconventionality; for the personal strength comes from a woman so severely alcoholic that she seems beyond repair, the love story is between a woman and a primate, and the environmental lesson is delivered as an eloquent speech by an ape who seems more an extraterrestrial envoy from the future than an evolutionary mistake from the past.

One could begin by describing it as an imaginative exodus into...