BOOK REVIEW / Rabbiting on in the shadow of a great boar: 'Light' - Torgny Lindgren, Tr. Tom Geddes: Harvill, 14.99 pounds

LOOKED BACK on from its final decade, the 20th century presents itself as an epoch in which humanity has been made peculiarly mindful of the fragility of civilisation. Not only have there been cataclysmic returns to barbarism, in the form of global wars and mob movements that have glorified bestiality, but the very nature of urban life, as it was moulded by the Industrial Revolution, has heralded a proud new primitivism; the jungle has been resurrected.

Even in the century's less stormy segments, socio-cultural breakdown has always seemed perilously close. For example, even in the relatively tranquil time before he was killed in the First World War, the English thinker T E Hulme portrayed civilisation as no more than a tenuous web superimposed on a heaving chaos of cinders. 'In this ash-pit of cinders, certain ordered routes have been made, thus constituting whatever unity there may be . . . a gossamer world of symbolic communication.'

In the case of Kadis, the hamlet where the Swedish novelist Torgny Lindgren sets his grim new fable, that 'gossamer world' is hardly one of great sophistication, since his Kadis is a far northern settlement of many centuries ago and situated at 'the end of the world to which God had not penetrated'. But a semblance of civilisation does initially exist and its swift disintegration with the onset of a 'Great Sickness' is the sombre stuff of this inverted fairy-tale.

For all its antique context, Light is, among other things, a parable sprung from that archetypal modern ordeal, the collapse of the frail constructs of civilised interchange and the ensuing plunge back into bedlam, into what T S Eliot called 'the primitive terror'.

The Great Sickness, which spells the end for the thin veneer of order in remote Kadis, is borne there by a pregnant rabbit. The fateful animal is brought by an unwitting resident who had journeyed to the nearest town in a futile quest for the woman of his dreams - a phantom heart's-desire whose charms include close- set eyes, a high-bridged nose, knock-knees and a little gap between her front teeth. Such bizarre narrative touches may exemplify the famous Swedish sense of humour but are unlikely to engage the comic reflexes of Anglo-Saxony.

Yet, as with some sort of insane Ambridge, the reader is drawn into the madhouse ways of the denizens of Kadis once their numbers - and subsequently their laws and institutions - have been decimated by the plague. The precarious conventions of sex and property go by the board as the human population sinks to a handful of self-obsessed desperadoes.

Meanwhile life falls under the shadow of a grotesquely outsized boar whose birth will sicken, in Lindgren's relentless recounting, the most hardened devotees of primeval agriculture. Indeed, this densely allegorical story is heavy with manifestations of the morose and the weird which read like parodies of Scandinavian fantasy at its darkest. But eventually a self-styled agent of far-off royal authority arrives with the apparent intention of restoring order, only to prove a false emissary. Ultimately, however, in freeing themselves from the toils of this pseudo-saviour, the survivors of the Great Sickness are restored to a redeeming sense of kinship with the natural order.

This denouement is almost as implausible as Defoe's explanation of London's reprieve from total extinction by the scourge documented in his Journal of the Plague Year: 'In that very moment it pleased God, with a most agreeable surprise, to cause the fury of it to abate, even of itself.' The central character of Light, in any case, emerges from the gloom of the Great Sickness to see once again grass, birds and flowers, but above all sunshine, as being as refreshing as spring water. 'He had never experienced such powerful sunlight, and he became aware of how right and proper and natural and self-evident everything was.'

Ostensibly, this triumph over hellish disorder seems to bear out the dictum of Albert Camus, author of La Peste, that 'every negation contains a flowering of yes'. But the very last page of Light might be taken to indicate that Kadis faces still another round of rabbit-borne plague. Certainly this strange book, full of macabre incident and monstrous character, is not the kind of fable from which a happy ending is to be expected.