The Moomins, and their gift of tolerance

After the Moomin books started to be translated from Finnish into English in the late 1950s, several early critics clearly couldn’t figure them out. Sure, the books were odd and amusing enough – but the tales had no obvious beginning or end, and no discernible symbolic meaning. In fact, the plump little beings with tails who were at the centre of the stories didn’t seem to carry out a quest or experience any life lesson at all during the course of the stories. Moreover, there was no Alice or Christopher Robin to act as a re-assuring human guide in this strange environment. Not quite as intelligent as their British equivalents, one English reviewer concluded.

Usually, it is risky to assume a writer of fiction has been trading directly on their own life experience, but Jansson has made it clear that her own famous parents were the models for Moominpappa and Moominmamma. Her father was the renowned sculptor Viktor Jansson, and some of his work can be seen here and here. In the books, Moominpappa comes across as an energetic bundle of masculine vanity, self-absorbed to the point of folly. According to his daughter, Viktor did not exhibit those traits so much - but like his fictional counterpart, Viktor did have a love of the sea and for the bracing perils of outdoors adventure. Jansson’s mother was the artist Signe Hammersten Jansson, who designed Finland’s bank-notes and over 200 of the country’s postage stamps.

J ansson (in centre of photo with her mother and her partner Tuuliki Pietila) started writing the Moomin books in 1945, and stopped in 1970. As many have noted, the books fall into at least three stages, each different in tone and narrative coherence. There are the loose and carefree early adventures – Comet in Moominland, Finn Family Moomintroll ( which, for new readers, is probably the best starting point ) and Exploits of Moominpappa. In the mid 1950s, she wrote the more structured tales Moominland Midwinter and Moominsummer Madness, still probably the most purely enjoyable stories in the Moomin saga.

That last, sombre Moomin book is very much about coping with loss, and with the realization that family and childhood are no longer emotionally accessible - not in any idealized way at least, than can offer comfort. “I could no longer find my way back to that happy valley,” Jansson once wrote, in explaining her decision to effectively close the page on the Moomins. Or again : “ There has been a very clear line, in my work, in the course of which my books have become less and less childish. I finally reached the point where I simply couldn’t write for children anymore....perhaps because I wasn’t sufficiently childish myself anymore.’ In an echo of these sentiments, the characters in Moominvalley in November gradually discover a proper time and method of moving on from childhood. For the last 30 years of her life, Jansson concentrated on writing adult fiction.

Jansson was born in 1914 and died in 2001 at the age of 87. In Moominvalley, she created a fictional universe as fully realized – to take one recurring comparison – as the 100 Acre Wood of A. A. Milne. Think about it : rural setting, naïve hero, much good nature and whimsy, creatures who seem part animal, part human. Milne’s world though is resolutely male-centered ( Kanga excepted) and was inspired, reportedly, by his father’s experience with a school for boys.

For many readers, their favourite character is the tiny, gleefully uninhibited brat called Little My – a primal force who constantly provides a snarky commentary on the good-natured Moomins. Beyond them again are other recognisable types, even in translation from the Finnish. I particularly liked the bluff and bureaucratic Hemulens. ‘All round him there were people living slipshod and aimless lives. Everywhere wherever he looked there was something to put right, and he worked his fingers to the bone trying to get them to see how they ought to live.” Most Hemulens are male, though all of them wear skirts.

One should also mention those beings in Moominvalley that are like nothing else in literature, save perhaps in Lewis Carroll’s wilder moments. Best of all is the cold and lonely Groke, who is drawn inexorably to warmth and flame, but who freezes whatever she touches, and lays barren everywhere she sits. By the time we get to Moominpappa at Sea, a near teenage Moomintroll has entered into a dangerous kinship of sorts with the Groke. He goes down alone to the beach with a lamp that he swings back and forth - and the Groke dances towards him, swaying in her passage across the grey waves in time to the movements of the lamp.

By focusing on the darker, more complex conclusion of the Moomins, I hope I haven’t put off any latecomers. All it means is that these books need to be read in sequence. The high spirit of the first five books is peerless. And to my mind, the complex and melancholy elements that come to the fore in the last two books only make the entire series more admirable. The illustrations are also exceptional. Jansson had spent the first decade of her creative life trying to carve out a career as a painter, and the drawings have always been an integral part of the books’ enduring success. From 1954 onwards, a Moomins comic strip that was drawn initially by Jansson ( and later, by her brother) also became popular, world-wide. It is available in at least three volumes, and is recommended – though it has a singular atmosphere, different in tone and in content again, to any of the books.

That sense of tolerance seems finally, to be the overall point. The creatures in Moominvalley qualify for acceptance with all of their quirks, merely by dint of the fact that they exist. As Lurie pointed out in her essay, one of the strengths of the Moomin books is Jansson’s recognition that fear is as strong a force in childhood as the absence or presence of love. Physical threats such as floods, an onrushing comet and all the other unpredictable dangers of life in Moominvalley are conquered by the bonds of family, and by an almost nonchalant air of inclusion. Set the table for one more.