WILD BOAR: Alex Josephy is intrigued by an enigmatic and poetic first novel by Hannah Lutz which is deeply concerned about the climate crisis
Wild Boar
by Hannah Lutz
translated from Swedish by Andy Turner
The Emma Press
ISBN 978-1-915628-38-1
£10.99
.
Wild Boar is Hannah Lutz’s debut novel. I read it as a concise, unpredictable and marvellously original fable of the anthropocene era. Composed of three intertwined stories, and set in the forested area of Småland in Finland, it is wriitten in highly evocative, poetic language which as far as I can tell stands up very well in this translation.
I am no Nordic literature scholar. As a Moomintroll fan from childhood, I tend to associate Finland with wild landscapes and mythical beings; Lutz gives us other, darker images, much closer to contemporary life, but her narrative too draws on myth and magic.
All three stories are linked to the growing population of wild boar that inhabit the region, mysteriously at the same time prevalent and almost impossible to track down. There’s a ‘To the Lighthouse’ inaccessibility about the creatures, present but always just out of reach, throughout the book. It’s true that wild boar are increasing across Europe. In most countries they are hunted, for food and in an attempt to keep numbers down, and strong defences are put in place to keep them away from vulnerable crops. Stories appear in the news about wild boar incursions into farmland or even into city streets, and of the damaging way these animals can plough up earth and disrupt cultivation. In this story they appear in many guises, often vulnerable themselves to the accelerating degradation of the planet. But at other times they are an angry force of nature or a near-mystical presence that might offer some kind of wisdom.
Ritve is a young man on a pilgrimage to find and know more about the animals, having become fascinated by the documentary films of Arnold Falkberg, a reclusive boar hunter who may not have ‘fired a shot at a single wild boar in his life.’ Glenn, a local council worker, lives in the area with his partner Martina, conscious of the chaos wrought by climate change but still doing his best to live in harmony with nature (‘I compost and darn my old socks’) although he believes that ‘we’re heading for a new Ice Age.’ Mia, supported by Glenn in a local history project, is on a mission to help her ailing grandfather reconnect with his childhood as a ‘Sigga child’ – a graduate of the local Siggalycke school. Choosing to try to reawaken Grandad, almost mute after a damaging stay in a care home, Mia has parted from her lover Sara. Gradually, each of the three stories is inflected by and crosses the tracks of the wild boar.
Mia’s Grandad has told her about the Siggalycke schoolteacher Ivar Sandberg, who was befriended by Sig-ga, a particular, iconic wild sow who lets him know that ‘the human herd’ is destroying her and her ‘sounder’ – a word for a group of wild boar and here standing for all wild boar. Mia’s attempt to track down the old man’s memories, hoping to find a connection there to her own history, parallels the various ways in which all the characters search for the wild boar. Grandad too resists her efforts: ‘Is this love, or is it murder?…The more I speak, the further he moves out of sight.’
If this makes the book itself sound infuriatingly evasive, that is not the effect it had on me. It’s structured with a light touch, consisting of short episodes from each of the three stories. Although the links are not always explicit, this creates a sense of one interlocking narrative, perhaps a hunt for redemption or at least for meaning. The frequent small leaps from one point of view to another keep the story invitingly buoyant. Not to introduce too much of a spoiler, I will just note that there is no grand final revelation, more a gradual immersion (at least to this reader) into a little-known part of the world and into subtle areas of human and non-human relationships, and a growing intuition about what really matters in an age on the cusp of catastrophe.
Wild Boar’s provenance illustrates some fascinating connections between various Nordic countries; Lutz herself comes from a Finnish-Swedish background and now lives in Denmark, and the book was first pub-lished as a Danish translation. The Finnish place names are intriguingly musical to an English ear: Småland, Tingsryd, Linneryd, Hornanäs. At one point in the novel, Ritve chants the names to invoke ‘the melody of old addresses’ and to enlarge on the idea of sleepwalking as a way to return home, for people inextricably linked to the past. In an earlier passage, he recalls the same phenomenon in a film about Winnipeg:
‘The citizens…always carry a bunch of keys to their old homes. They have got used to
accommodating each other’s sleepwalking…People don’t ask; everyone knows, everyone
recognises it, the lure, the sleep mantra…’
Dreams offer the characters doorways into what they may be searching for. In a nightmare, Mia experiences the disturbing abuse of her grandad as a child, becoming one of the bullies who tormented him. Ritve’s closest encounter with the wild boar is in a vivid dream which has a profound effect on him. A sow leads her herd into wetland waters, and we sense Ritve’s joy at witnessing the scene as powerfully as the tenderness of the sow:
‘The large sow…comes out of the water and rolls in the mud on the shoreline, shaking
herself over the boarlets, nudges them lightly with her snout. They yield and slip into
the warter. They snort.’
On waking, Ritve himself is quietly ecstatic:
‘In the mornings I sometimes find myself filled with an intense yearning for them, the
other people, their soft arms and legs, their faces not yet hardened by the day.’
The book ends with no easy answers. The wild boar are as mysteriously distant as ever; some characters suffer disaster, others are still lost or searching; the future of the planet does not look good. But Lutz defends a space for unexpected possibilities, and that in itself is uplifting. This novel really does repay reading with the focussed attention we usually give to poetry. It’s a terrific and timely addition to eco-literature, and to the Emma Press catalogue.
Jul 20 2025
WILD BOAR
WILD BOAR: Alex Josephy is intrigued by an enigmatic and poetic first novel by Hannah Lutz which is deeply concerned about the climate crisis
Wild Boar is Hannah Lutz’s debut novel. I read it as a concise, unpredictable and marvellously original fable of the anthropocene era. Composed of three intertwined stories, and set in the forested area of Småland in Finland, it is wriitten in highly evocative, poetic language which as far as I can tell stands up very well in this translation.
I am no Nordic literature scholar. As a Moomintroll fan from childhood, I tend to associate Finland with wild landscapes and mythical beings; Lutz gives us other, darker images, much closer to contemporary life, but her narrative too draws on myth and magic.
All three stories are linked to the growing population of wild boar that inhabit the region, mysteriously at the same time prevalent and almost impossible to track down. There’s a ‘To the Lighthouse’ inaccessibility about the creatures, present but always just out of reach, throughout the book. It’s true that wild boar are increasing across Europe. In most countries they are hunted, for food and in an attempt to keep numbers down, and strong defences are put in place to keep them away from vulnerable crops. Stories appear in the news about wild boar incursions into farmland or even into city streets, and of the damaging way these animals can plough up earth and disrupt cultivation. In this story they appear in many guises, often vulnerable themselves to the accelerating degradation of the planet. But at other times they are an angry force of nature or a near-mystical presence that might offer some kind of wisdom.
Ritve is a young man on a pilgrimage to find and know more about the animals, having become fascinated by the documentary films of Arnold Falkberg, a reclusive boar hunter who may not have ‘fired a shot at a single wild boar in his life.’ Glenn, a local council worker, lives in the area with his partner Martina, conscious of the chaos wrought by climate change but still doing his best to live in harmony with nature (‘I compost and darn my old socks’) although he believes that ‘we’re heading for a new Ice Age.’ Mia, supported by Glenn in a local history project, is on a mission to help her ailing grandfather reconnect with his childhood as a ‘Sigga child’ – a graduate of the local Siggalycke school. Choosing to try to reawaken Grandad, almost mute after a damaging stay in a care home, Mia has parted from her lover Sara. Gradually, each of the three stories is inflected by and crosses the tracks of the wild boar.
Mia’s Grandad has told her about the Siggalycke schoolteacher Ivar Sandberg, who was befriended by Sig-ga, a particular, iconic wild sow who lets him know that ‘the human herd’ is destroying her and her ‘sounder’ – a word for a group of wild boar and here standing for all wild boar. Mia’s attempt to track down the old man’s memories, hoping to find a connection there to her own history, parallels the various ways in which all the characters search for the wild boar. Grandad too resists her efforts: ‘Is this love, or is it murder?…The more I speak, the further he moves out of sight.’
If this makes the book itself sound infuriatingly evasive, that is not the effect it had on me. It’s structured with a light touch, consisting of short episodes from each of the three stories. Although the links are not always explicit, this creates a sense of one interlocking narrative, perhaps a hunt for redemption or at least for meaning. The frequent small leaps from one point of view to another keep the story invitingly buoyant. Not to introduce too much of a spoiler, I will just note that there is no grand final revelation, more a gradual immersion (at least to this reader) into a little-known part of the world and into subtle areas of human and non-human relationships, and a growing intuition about what really matters in an age on the cusp of catastrophe.
Wild Boar’s provenance illustrates some fascinating connections between various Nordic countries; Lutz herself comes from a Finnish-Swedish background and now lives in Denmark, and the book was first pub-lished as a Danish translation. The Finnish place names are intriguingly musical to an English ear: Småland, Tingsryd, Linneryd, Hornanäs. At one point in the novel, Ritve chants the names to invoke ‘the melody of old addresses’ and to enlarge on the idea of sleepwalking as a way to return home, for people inextricably linked to the past. In an earlier passage, he recalls the same phenomenon in a film about Winnipeg:
Dreams offer the characters doorways into what they may be searching for. In a nightmare, Mia experiences the disturbing abuse of her grandad as a child, becoming one of the bullies who tormented him. Ritve’s closest encounter with the wild boar is in a vivid dream which has a profound effect on him. A sow leads her herd into wetland waters, and we sense Ritve’s joy at witnessing the scene as powerfully as the tenderness of the sow:
On waking, Ritve himself is quietly ecstatic:
The book ends with no easy answers. The wild boar are as mysteriously distant as ever; some characters suffer disaster, others are still lost or searching; the future of the planet does not look good. But Lutz defends a space for unexpected possibilities, and that in itself is uplifting. This novel really does repay reading with the focussed attention we usually give to poetry. It’s a terrific and timely addition to eco-literature, and to the Emma Press catalogue.