TBR Pile Review: The Rabbit Factor, by Antti Tuomainen, translated by David Hackston

An insurance mathematician’s carefully ordered life is turned on its head when he unexpectedly loses his job and inherits an adventure park … with a whole host of problems. A quirky, tense and warmly funny thriller from award-winning Finnish author Antti Tuomainen.

What makes life perfect? Insurance mathematician Henri Koskinen knows the answer because he calculates everything down to the very last decimal.

And then, for the first time, Henri is faced with the incalculable. After suddenly losing his job, Henri inherits an adventure park from his brother – its peculiar employees and troubling financial problems included. The worst of the financial issues appear to originate from big loans taken from criminal quarters … and some dangerous men are very keen to get their money back.

But what Henri really can’t compute is love. In the adventure park, Henri crosses paths with Laura, an artist with a chequered past, and a joie de vivre and erratic lifestyle that bewilders him. As the criminals go to extreme lengths to collect their debts and as Henri’s relationship with Laura deepens, he finds himself faced with situations and emotions that simply cannot be pinned down on his spreadsheets…

Warmly funny, rich with quirky characters and absurd situations, The Rabbit Factor is a triumph of a dark thriller, its tension matched only by its ability to make us rejoice in the beauty and random nature of life.

My Review

Yesterday I spent the day reading The Rabbit Factor, by Antti Tuomainen, published by Orenda Books 2021.

Well, to be more precise, because Henri would probably prefer it, for seven hours in the evening until quite late on I was reading. I had a sandwich break after about six hours.

Henri is an actuary. He works for an insurance company in Helsinki and lives in an apartment in a reasonably priced area, close to the city centre and with good transport links. He thinks it’s beautiful because it’s so sensible. I think there’s a joke in their about the area being beautiful to him but others consider it bland. I don’t know Helsinki so I can only assume it’s a joke that people who do know Helsinki would get. This sets us up to get to know Henri, a man who loves mathematics, precise information and likes to work at work. He doesn’t like the new open Lan office his company has moved into, the way the manager speaks, or the ridiculous courses he’s forced to go on. Or his colleagues who spend more time looking at YouTube videos or talking about their lives than actually doing any work.

He gets fired one morning, a clear case of constructive dismissal. Then he finds out his brother has died.

And left him a children’s indoor adventure park.

Which is in massive amounts of debt.

Henri takes to his new challenges with fear, careful calculations and the judicious use of a large plastic and metal rabbit ear. Along the way he finds love, learns that he’s more that an actuary and does some terrible things.

I could definitely make a case that Henri is Autistic, at least in a stereotypical fashion: he is rigid and limited in his interests, struggles with communication and has been like this since childhood. Non-stereotypically, he is accidentally hilarious, honest to a fault, logical and highly sensitive to changes in his environment. His response to art is familiar. Pretty certain Antti wasn’t going for an autistic character, just a quirky one.

All three of Antti Tuomainen’s book that I’ve read have had a main character that has been put in a difficult and slightly ludicrous situation, which has forced them to do objectively bad things for subjectivity good reasons. It’s a formula that seems to work well for the author. The results are darkly comic novels with strong plots, fascinating characters and strangely enough, cheerful or at least optimistic endings. The Rabbit Factor does not disappoint in this.

I usually try to get on blog tours from @Orendabooks, but I missed this one. Really happy to have bought my own copy though.