Light
By: Torgny Lindgren ; translated from the Swedish by Tom Geddes.
Publisher: Harvill
Published: 1992
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 236
Subjects: Epidemics -- Sweden -- Fiction.; Sweden -- Fiction.
Description: The Great Sickness was brought to Kadis, in the furthest north of Sweden, by a pregnant rabbit. When the Sickness had finished its ravages, and the dead had been buried, and the surplus livestock had been slaughtered, there remained among the empty wooden houses of Kadis only three men and three women, the huge boar Blasius, a few cows and goats, and countless rabbits. Soon there were three babies, too.

But there was no one who knew any more how things were supposed to be, what was lawful and, in the business of daily living, what was right and wrong. Then a stranger came from the south; he said he was sent by the King, to restore things to the way they had to be. He instituted a Trial, handed down judgment for the six to execute upon themselves, then departed - but who was to know whether he was not a false emissary?

The values of civilisation and barbarity remained balanced on a knife-edge until the three men and three women - and the boar-pig - made their bid to escape at last from the shadows. Light is a parable about life in a primitive society at the edge of the civilised world; it is a radical search for the enduring elements that distinguish human kind from mere livestock; it is a brilliantly achieved fable for our times.