Return to the Moominvalley
Three weeks ago, asked to name a favourite book, I chose Moominland Midwinter by the Finnish writerTove Jansson, a haunting tale about homesickness, endurance, joy. It's a funny and happy-sad book I was delighted by as a child, and adored in a heartbroken way as an adult, reading it to my own children over and again (we know passages by heart; we talk about the characters like friends; my youngest daughter's guinea pig is named after Snufkin, the wandering creature with a mouth organ and a battered hat), and weeping helplessly every time.
A week later I was in Sweden, in the place I go each year whose forests and lakes are reminiscent of Moominvalley. Summer is green and gentle, with clouds of butterflies and sudden flowers; winter harsh and long. Half the year is full of sunlight and soft shadows, the other half cold and icy and black. There is something mystic about the Nordic temperament: the long dark brings with it thoughts of loneliness and mortality, whose memory makes sunny days brighter, more fragile.
It was here I heard Tove Jansson had died, aged 86. She had long ceased writing about the family of trolls and their foster relatives. You can see, in the chronology of the books, how they had become progressively less optimistic and cheery, more melancholy and strange. Her final Moomin book was published in 1970: 'I couldn't continue,' she later said. 'I couldn't go back and find that happy Moominvalley again.' Many of the greatest children's books are about growing up, leaving childhood's idyllic home. Reading the captivating Moomin books now, they feel like a long goodbye.
Tove Jansson was born in 1914. Her mother was an artist, and Jansson recalled sitting by the fire with her and listening to stories 'about people who are homesick for their own country or get lost and then find their way again'. Her father was a sculptor (she wrote a collection of vivid autobiographical fragments called The Sculptor's Daughter) and a patriarchal figure who, Jansson once said, quelled her creativity.
Her intense childhood clearly provides models for the Moomins - Moominpappa is insecure and capricious; Moominmamma is serene, hospitable, wise: she carries treats and remedies in her capacious handbag and when strangers arrive she lays another place at the table, puts sheets on another bed. Mild, anxious Moomintroll longs for adventures, as long as he can go home again to the blue house and the smell of baking.
Jansson left school ('boring, and I have forgotten everything about it, including why I was afraid of it') at 15. She became a prominent artist and cartoonist. In 1945 she began to write about the Moomins and their friends.
In her first book, her main character is angry and ugly, but by Finn Family Moomintroll he is the dreamy, soft-hearted Moomintroll translated into dozens of language, anaesthetised in a TV series, turned with his family and friends into biscuits, soft toys, games, theme parks. Jansson became rich and famous, but remained mysterious. For much of her life she lived with her companion, the (female) artist Tuulikki Pietila (the glorious Too-Ticki in Moomintroll Midwinter), on an island off Finland, accessible only by rowing boat.
The writer's character was marked by depression. When she was old and looking back, she said: 'I've had an exciting and varied life that I'm glad of, though it has been trying as well. If I could live it all over again, I'd do it completely differently. But I won't say how.'
In the books, there are storms, comets, floods, disasters. There are psychological anxieties (Moominpappa at Sea, in which the father uproots his entire family, is about a boastful male's midlife crisis; in Moominland Midwinter, Moomintroll awakes early from hibernation, to discover that his home is become white, cold and hostile, inhabited by strangers). There's the Groke, the howling female who turns the land to ice. There are Hattifatteners, Creeps, Hemulens, Fillyjonks; the Snork Maiden, for whom Moomin has bashfully romantic feelings; timid Sniff; poetic Snufkin; Thingummy and Bob (who lave a hanguage that soes gomething thike lis); angry, indomitable Little My.
Above all, there's the feeling of finding and losing, of losing and then finding again; of leaving home and returning, of returning but knowing it's not for ever; of winter turning to summer, but of summer being haunted by the dark and cold to come. Everything must pass. Time passes, and life.
Jansson's last book is Moominvalley in November. It is set in a season of silence and rain and growing darkness. The beloved Moomin family do not even appear. Their friends wait for them, although they have grown hazy in their memories, like a dream. Finally a light is seen across the sea. They are coming home; but we will not see them again.
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