The Rabbit Factor

The Rabbit Factor is about various animals, such as a giant plastic rabbit and a really fabulous cat called Schopenhauer, but it is mostly about sharks. Not those huge creatures roaming freely in the oceans, but the ugly violent loan sharks that take advantage of people’s financial difficulties. They thrive on abusing their power, being brutal and reckless, and ignoring law and logic. And Henri Koskinen cannot deal with a lack of logic.

As an insurance mathematician, Henri manages to calculate everything in his private and professional life to ensure the optimal conditions for peace and quiet, and the boring yet balanced existence that he has always led. Mathematics also provided a safety net in his chaotic childhood and an escape from the modern world. But then he suddenly loses his secure job and inherits an adventure park after his brother Juhani’s untimely death.

Henri is bewildered in circumstances that cannot be neatly entered onto a spreadsheet and then analysed with precision. He learns more about the difference between an adventure park and an amusement park, and how an adventure park operates from the inside and quickly realises that it’s impossible to be amused in the face of his new situation. He has to deal with a team of odd employees and the massive debts accrued by Juhani, chaotic finances, strange requests from staff and even stranger visits from the representatives of the criminal world. Of course, the baddies are dangerous and promptly drop the pretend friendly act to threaten Henri and his new venture and get their money back. And there’s the massive interest increasing daily.

Henri’s well-calculated days turns into weeks of anarchy and desperate ideas, juggling white lies, fixing broken bits of machinery and setting up imaginative new accounts with his own bank to appease the powerful criminal in charge.  

As ever, Antti Tuomainen writes with his trademark flair, humour and wisdom. The premise of putting an unassuming man in charge of a business that he knows nothing about, surrounded by pulsating life, screaming children and the constant smell of fast food is excellent.

I learnt some new words such as actuary, tried to follow complicated assessments, and decided that maths at this level is definitely not for me. Kudos to David Hackston, the translator who rendered the original Finish into English. I also now know that both a rabbit’s ear and an oversized cinnamon bun can be used as a deadly weapon, and that it’s important to place a dead body in an industrial-size freezer in the correct way, otherwise hundreds of frozen chicken legs might go to waste, which means no meals for customers, and no income to save and to repay the debts.

What I adored about this story is the pure unadulterated absurdity, the panicky creativity, some very peculiar characters, the over-the-top cartoon violence and the discovery of what love is. The Rabbit Factor is not just about Henri surviving death by hanging in a barn or suffication by a topless dancer or getting turned into jam or squashed by a car. It’s also about him finding passion in life and discovering the totally unexpected sensation of falling in love with Laura, a vivacious, enthusiastic artist with a dark past who works at the park. All the emotion and the tension in a race against time to remain alive makes this book a fantastic, exuberant joy to read. One word of warning - some sharks were harmed.