Magic in the Gulf of Finland
Philip Hensher A WINTER BOOK: SELECTED STORIES by Tove Jansson Sort of Books, £6.99, pp. 192, ISBN 0954899520 © £5.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Tove Jansson's The Summer Book had been published before in this country, but when, two years ago, the enterprising Sort of Books reissued it for the first time in many years, it seemed that its moment had come. I pressed it on a lot of people, often to find that they, too, had discovered this extraordinary masterpiece. Something about its quality of rootedness, of unnarrated exploration of a tiny territory strikes a chord just now. It is the opposite of escapist; rather, a hymn of praise to the scrap of land wherever we may find ourselves.
It's a book of the utmost simplicity, and almost without discernible plot. A grandmother and her grand-daughter spend their summers on a minuscule island in the Gulf of Finland. There is a father, too — withdrawn, since his wife, without explanation, died. The women, both old and young, examine their island, take small journeys, shore themselves up as best they can against the irruptions of the modern world, people who don't know the correct way of doing things when living with the sea. The magic of the book is that it is utterly exact and specific about all aspects of its landscape, but remains tantalisingly ambiguous about the emotions which underlie the relationships of its highly taciturn cast.
The power of The Summer Book shouldn't have come as a surprise to respectful readers of Tove Jansson's wellknown Moomin books. As an author and illustrator, she wrote a series of these between 1945 and 1970. They are generally remembered as being charming or even a little bit cutesy — books for very young children about the little adventures of creatures rather like stuffed toys. (You can, if you wish, take your children to visit a horrid-looking theme park in Naantali. If they enjoy themselves, frankly you should leave them there.) Actually, the books are very unlike our own Winnie-the-Pooh. They have an acute sense of the forest, of the wild North, and of emotional despair, however oddly expressed. I never listen to the slow movement of Sibelius's third symphony without thinking of Snufkin's favourite song, 'All small beasts should have bows in their tails.' The characters aren't jolly archetypes, but tend to sneak up shyly, revealing their natures gradually. They are never even really individuals, but examples of their type.
The last book in the series, Moominland in November, was written and published after the death of Jansson's beloved mother, and is by any standards a great novel. The Moomin family have gone away — no one knows where — and the book is populated by the minor characters. A new character called Toft, a self-portrait, has always dreamt of the valley in exact creative detail, and finally makes his way there. With the others — the fussy Fillyjonk, the braggadocio Hemulen, a senile old man — he tries to recreate the idyllic life of the Moomin valley. Even Snufkin, the most assured of them, seems lost and tetchy, and loses his cool so far as to shout at the other characters. At the end, Snufkin leaves as he always leaves, without saying goodbye and walking alone into the forest, and Toft starts to think he might have got even Moominmamma wrong: Toft felt all his pictures disappear. His descriptions of the valley and the happy family faded and slipped away, Moominmamma glided away and became remote, an impersonal picture, he didn't even know what she looked like. Toft walked on through the forest, stooping under the branches, creeping and crawling, and thinking of nothing at all, and became as empty as the crystal ball. This is where Moominmamma had walked when she was tired and cross and disappointed and wanted to be on her own, wandering aimlessly in the endless forest lost in her dejection. Toft saw an entirely new Moominmamma and she seemed natural to him.
Only in the very last sentences does Toft see a boat approaching — it 'was a very long way away. Toft had plenty of time to go down through the forest and along the beach to the jetty, and be just in time to catch the line and tie up the boat.' But to that reunion, or union, we are not allowed to be witnesses, even if we could still see the print on the page through our tears.
After that, Jansson turned to writing for adults. This collection is not exactly one of her own, but has been put together by Sort www.spectator.co.uk of Books out of her later collections. Most of it is from her collection of autobiographical stories, The Sculptor's Daughter. Jansson was the daughter of a sculptor and an illustrator, and these are a winning combination of fantasy and recollection. In one, the whole of Helsinki learns how to fly; in another, the girl takes a peculiar revenge on her father's pet monkey. (One might think this on the fantastic side, but there is a most alarming photograph included of Viktor Jansson exchanging a full-on snog with a startled-looking simian.) Just as in The Summer Book, the ideas and characters which animate her children's fiction are presented in more everyday terms. The rules of Jansson's world are strict but never hectoring, and conveyed by example rather than instruction. Her characters learn always to batten things down; always to do things properly, if they do them at all; it's best always to treat the world with respect. Try not to love or collect too many things, but love the things you love properly. Jansson's last years might well have been difficult, artistically speaking; her tendency towards autobiography and her dislike of the interest of fans in her life were incompatible in the end. Some of these later fragments, such as three stories made up of correspondence lightly fictionalised or not fictionalised at all, have a feeling of exhaustion and impatience. One story, 'Messages', is merely random excerpts from what must have become a highly tiresome daily mailbag: Hi! We're three girls in a mad rush with our essays about how you could help us by saying in just a few words how you started writing and why and what life means to you and then a message to young people, you know the kind of thing. Thanks in advance.
But at the end there is a noble envoy, an account of how Jansson and Pietila came to leave the island. One summer, the nets become too hard to haul in; they develop, of all things, a fear of the sea, and realise it's time to leave. They batten everything down, leave notes explaining certain objects — 'for no one could be expected to know that an excrement-yellow lump weighing five kilos was seal fat for the preparation of the wooden jetty'. A bottle of rum is left in the secret room which is sealed up, to reward the new owners' natural curiosity, for the island is to be given away. And then on the last day, Tuulikka finds an old kite from the 1960s, and takes it out onto the slope.
Just for fun, she gave it a little push on its tail, and at that moment a gust of wind came along and took the kite with it and it flew high, straight up, and continued far out across the Gulf of Finland.
It is a most lovely and Snufkin-like farewell, without a wave goodbye or an explanation; just perhaps a shy sideways glance under the brim of a hat as she slips into the margins of the immense forest.
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