I’ll be honest I'm not sure where to start with The Rabbit Back Literature Society. On the surface it’s a little pot-boiler mystery involving a beloved children’s author who disappears, in full public view, during a party. Where the mystery begins is that she is the founder of the eponymous society for prominent authors and all is not what it might seem with the nine members. But really it’s much more than that, it’s a very adult fable - almost a metafiction - resonant with themes of reality versus fiction, memory versus truth, about experiences, secrets and lies and the facade we construct around ourselves, but it gives nothing of itself away in the telling. If you want answers you’ll be disappointed, if you want to be kept thinking long after you put it down, then this is the book for you.
We meet our heroine, a teacher named Ella Milana, “the possessor of a pair of dreamily curving lips and a pair of defective ovaries, among other parts”, when she is presented with a student essay on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov gets shot by Sonya instead of being sent to prison. When it turns out the copy of the book in the library does actually contain this text she decides to investigate, and discovers that this strange infection plagues many of the novels in the town’s library. It’s during this time that a story she submitted is published and Ella Milana is invited to join the prestigious Rabbit Back Literature Society.
It’s at the party for Ella Milana’s introduction as the tenth and final member of the society that Laura White, the founder, disappears and the plot begins to thicken. Bereft of her would-be tutor, Ella delves into what membership means and discovers that the society members play what they call The Game, a slightly sado-masochistic question-and-answer session where one member challenges another to spill their most intimate secrets, often under the influence of ‘The Yellow’ (sodium pentothal), which the other can then use as material in their next book. It’s while playing the game that Ella learns that their was a previous, original 10th member with talents far exceeding the others but who mysteriously disappeared as decades earlier when the rest of the society were all just children.
Beautifully written with just a soupçon of magical realism about it, this is the first of Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen’s novels to be translated into English from its native Finnish and it likely won’t be the last. It’s slow to build but once you start reading you’re drawn in tighter and tighter and you have to keep turning the pages. By turns quirky and fun, dark and suspenseful, written with the kind of verve and wit to which few authors even aspire, it has a deft touch with some rather deep themes and wraps them in the guise of a fairytale, but one that you wouldn’t tell a child.
The story meanders and twists and turns without actually opening up much but it is always engaging and never dull and the characters are all beautifully drawn and fully realised as individuals, memorable and distinct from each other, the least interesting funnily enough being Ella Milana, but this helps to offset her as she comes into contact with each of the others in turn. There are plenty of loose ends as well, we never get to the bottom of the book plagues, or the disappearance of Laura White or the packs of dogs that stand vigil outside Martti, one of the other authors, home. But for all that, the ending works, despite not really satisfying completely.
If you read The Rabbit Back Literature Society expecting a straightforward fantasy story then you’ll be disappointed, it’s neither fantastical enough nor enough of a story, but if you want a deft, well woven study of the disparate truths in relationships and of the secrets and lies in collective memory then it could be just the book you’re looking for. In any case, it’ll be one of the most intriguing and beguiling books you’ll read for a long, long time.
The Rabbit Back Literature Society is published by Pushkin Press, and is available with free delivery from The Book Depository and on the high street from Blackwell and all good book stores.
Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen has a blog and is on Twitter, if you speak Finnish…