The year has come to an end. How many times have you wished to run away from life? The city you live in? The people who inhabit your home? The job you are indifferent to? This is your fantasy – you cannot really run away, you cannot really be so reckless.
But Kaarlo Vatanen takes the chance when the universe offers it to him. An injured hare leads him into a forest and Vatanen decides this is the right time to say goodbye to his civilised city life. The Year of the Hare by Finnish writer Arto Paasilinna, translated by Herbert Lomas, presents this delightful possibility of running away and starting anew when you’re sure that you have slid even lower than rock bottom.
An unlikely friend
Trapped between a loveless marriage and a journalist’s job that feels like a chore, Vatanen has truly given up on life. Even the house where all the “items were at odds” and it is difficult to “inhabit the rooms without injury”, reminds him of his ill-tempered wife and their difficult relationship. The relationship is so bitter that his wife does not track him down or enquire about his whereabouts when Vatanen disappears in the forest without a trace. From this moment on, Vatanen and his leporid companion get into a series of strange, amusing adventures.
The first order of business is to take care of the hare’s leg – which Vatanen does promptly. The two become inseparable and Vatanen refuses to release the animal in the wild and procures a permit that legally allows him to take care of it. As their lives become intertwined, Vatanen finds himself in primal dangers that he would probably be safe from in Helsinki. A raging fire engulfs the forest and its inhabitants and Vatanen joins a group of firefighters as they race against time to bring the situation under control. A dramatic account of grime and soot follows.
The fire is ultimately tamed but this is just the beginning. Vatanen is about to have a year unlike any before. A cow gets stuck in a marsh, a crow is found robbing humans, a ferocious bear launches an attack on the hare and Vatanen. A life away from the city tests our protagonist but this is still preferable to the hard unhappiness that followed him around until now. The numerous animal characters and their human-like preoccupations are reminiscent of Scottish writer Kenneth Graham’s children’s classic The Wind in the Willows. Though, here, of course, the animal-human conflict plays out in a more real, urgent way as both creatures find themselves in hostile situations that threaten their sovereignty.
As Vatanen and the hare move from village to village, they encounter a strange bunch of humans that add more excitement to their adventures. In one instance, Vatanen drinks himself into a blackout and in another has sex with a woman much to the hare’s inconvenience. The hare is thrown out of the room and thirty minutes later when Vatanen goes to fetch him, they are both embarrassed by the cause of their brief separation. “Loving animals is a heavy load,” decides Vatanen.
The romance – if it can be called that – doesn’t last long. Vatanen will not be tethered to any place by anything or anyone. This is the year of the hare. The show must always be on the road. Next, he crosses paths with a weird old man who believes he has evidence that the president of Finland is two different people. He is convinced of this to be true. More misadventures follow and with the hare in his pocket, Vatanen ends up in the Soviet Karelian ASSR’s custody for two months.
Now confined in a foreign land, his year of mischief seems to have finally caught up with him. The petty crimes he has committed along the way have not escaped notice – he is accused of twenty-two counts of lawbreaking, the final claiming that Vatanen has confessed guilty to each point. He insists that the hare be recorded as his accomplice – like a mother, he cannot live without his child. The “beloved creature” would share his cell and comfort him during his imprisonment.
Miracle and courage
The Year of the Hare is a gorgeous, whimsical novel about a social misfit whose life changes (literally!) in an instant. The fable and fairytale-like mood of the novel doesn’t take away from the real drudgery of human life. Paasilinna makes you root for a hero – an outsider, a rule breaker, probably unpleasant to be around – who dares to finally live the way he would like to. Carpe diem, like they say.
The novel refuses to treat animals as mute creatures and instead sees them as providential hands that have the power to change lives. Anyone who has known the love of an animal would agree how transformative it can be, especially when it feels like you have hit a dead end.
This is the stuff of Christmas miracles, isn’t it? Finding love and companionship when you least expect it. Accepting your idiosyncrasies. Taking joy in solitude. Arto Paasilinna reimagines the timeless friendship between a man and an animal as an ode to unconventional living. “Anyone could live this life”, he writes, “provided they had the nous to give up the other way of life.” As a new year peeks at us from the corner, will we finally find the “nous” to let go of everything that makes us unhappy? Only time will tell.
The Year of the Hare, Arto Paasilinna, translated from the Finnish by Herbet Lomas, Pushkin Press.
