All posts tagged Moomintroll

Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson (1965)

Moominpappa went and sat on the lighthouse-keeper’s little ledge and thought: ‘I must do something different, something new. Something tremendous.’ But he didn’t know what it was he wanted to do. He was quite bewitched and confused. (p.114)

This is a sad and troubling book. Moominpappa mopes about the house because everything in Moomin Valley is fixed and everything is taken care of.  Little My says he needs to get angry and let off steam, and indeed he bickers with Moominmamma in a way unimaginable in the earlier, innocent books. A little fire starts in the wood and he is irritated because his family puts it out before he even gets there. The Groke slides up to the house and Moominpappa likes to think of himself as the manly protector of his family, even though he joins the others in locking and bolting the door and hiding under the table.

He needs to ‘get away’, and decides to take his family to a remote island to start again. There’s a tiny dot on the map in the middle of sea. An island, reputedly with a lighthouse. Yes, they’ll go there.

A reduced Moomin family

Apart from the prevalent sad, middle-aged storyline, another way in which this book is very different from the earlier ones is that the family is massively reduced. The only people who sail with him to the new island are Moominmamma, Moomintroll and Little My. My has to be in the book to provide her own brand of malicious mischief, otherwise it really would just be the story of a man having a sad, mid-life crisis. Luckily she’s there to burst everyone’s balloon with the most cynical, quick, heartless attitude imaginable. Always bracing, sometimes really funny.

Little My was sitting on the steps, singing one of her monotonous wet-weather songs.
‘Hallo,’ said Moominpappa. ‘I’m angry.’
‘Good!’ said little My with approval. ‘You look as though you’d made a proper enemy of someone. It always helps.’ (p.102)

But whatever happened to Sniff, Moomintroll’s babysh companion? Or Snufkin? Or the Muskrat or the Mymble, the Whomper, Gaffsie, Too-ticky and all the other friends they’ve acquired in the previous books? They have all disappeared, are not mentioned – everything is subsumed to Moominpappa’s unhappiness.

The Groke

I was particularly struck by the way that the Groke – the big sad lonely figure which radiates deathly cold wherever she goes – previously a strange and ominous and fleeting figure – is handled in this book. Previously she appeared and disappeared for no reason, adding to the eerily wonderful sense of magic about Moomin Valley. But now Jansson dwells on her character and her immense loneliness at some length. She is attracted to the lamp back in Moomin Valley and when she sees the family sailing away with the lamp tied to the mast she determines to follow it and she does, by placing one foot in front of another on the restless sea, making it freeze solid at her touch. Thus she creates an ice bridge all the way to the island, following the little Moomin family like some kind of avenging angel or bad conscience.

The laughing children of the earlier books have all been swept away. Sad middle-aged characters are centre stage.

Compare and contrast the small, human-scale, comedy Moominhouse which Moominpappa builds back in The Exploits of Moominpappa.

with the way the tiny Moomin figures are intimidated and overwhelmed by the enormous, bare, bleak lighthouse they find when they arrive at the barren island in this book –

And what was often left powerfully unstated in the previous books is now made brutally explicit. Previously we were told that grass or flowers where the Groke passed were instantly frozen, in a rather wonderful fairy-tale way. Now Jannson makes it brutally clear that wherever the Groke sits for any length of time is killed stone dead and nothing will ever grow there again. This is a small but significant example of the way the tone has shifted from things withheld and, so, magical – and things stated explicitly and so become much more human and upsetting.

Moominpappa’s desperate enthusiasms

Again and again Moominpappa finds a project – lighting the lighthouse lamp, setting nets at sea, fishing in the black pool, building a breakwater out of big rocks – which fire and invigorate him but which, somehow, in the event, fizzle out in failure and disappointment.

Again and again he tries to assert his authority over his tiny family, declaring there is a fixed order to unpack the boat, to decorate the lighthouse, that only he knows about the sea or fishing or nets, or anything. And the others listen politely, then go about their business regardless, and on more than one occasion a frustrated Moominpappa is driven to declaring that he hates family life.

One such failure is the great effort to take out the old lighthouse-keeper’s nets and set them in just the right place off the coast. A huge storm blows up. Next day Moomintroll rows Moominpappa out and they both feel how heavy the nets are – boy, they’re going to be full of fish!

But as they struggle to drag the nets aboard their little dinghy it becomes clear the nets are full of nothing but seaweed; there isn’t a single fish. Fail.

Moominpappa felt quite deflated. This seaweed had come right after that wretched business of the lamp, it wasn’t fair. One toiled and toiled and nothing worked. Things just seemed to slip through one’s fingers. (p.91)

Moominmamma is endlessly supportive with her ‘Yes dear’, with her stoic agreement to leave her whole household and life behind her and settle in the unfriendly, damp surroundings of the half-ruined lighthouse, and Moomintroll is puzzled and confused. Neither of them can help the unhappy middle-aged man at the centre of the story.

Keeping bad thoughts at bay

What comes over from the text is the sense of someone deeply troubled by life and constantly looking to find a safe haven, a home, a secure place where the ‘black thoughts’ won’t start up and take over.

They come across a deep black pool among the rocks, which Moominpappa ends up being attracted to and fishing in for hours at a time, in quiet desperation.

Moominpappa was convinced with a kind of desperate certainty that at the bottom of [the pool] secrets were waiting for him. And there might be just anything down there. He thought that if he could only get everything up he would understand the sea, everything would fall into place. He felt he would fit in, too. (p.122)

This desperate search to ‘fit in’.

When Moominmamma decides to collect all the driftwood and timber she can find on the island and uses it to build a snug in the lee of the lighthouse and then starts sawing it all to the same length – this activity sort of has the reassuring feel of her quiet domestic tasks back in Moomin Valley – but it also feels slightly mad, a kind of obsessive compulsive behaviour designed to keep things at bay, the ‘things’ being doubts and worries about the future. She does it to fill the long empty days. She does it to avoid feeling ‘so much alone.’ (p.118)

They are both stricken.

Island mysticism

With most of the childish comedy stripped away, and putting on one side the middle-aged depression, the other strain which emerges most strongly is the strange and eerie, the almost mystical strain, in Jansson’s writing. The island they sail to is said to be ‘watching’ the little boat. The abandoned lighthouse is looking at them.

Moomintroll wanders off and discovered a secret dell amid the stunted little trees of the island. He also discovers a silver horseshoe on the beach and waits and waits until one magical evening he sees the sea horses dancing on the sand, kicking up rainbows from their hooves.

But more than these rather obviously magic moments, there are lots of quiet paragraphs where one or other character really communes with the strange, alien, intractable but deeply magnetic island.

Now that he was alone Moomintroll could begin to look at the island and smell it in the right way. He could feel it with his paws, prick up his ears and listen to it. Away from the roar of the sea the island was quieter than the valley at home, completely silent and terribly, terribly old. (p38)

It isn’t a pleasant place. It isn’t a friendly environment. It isn’t a sunny Greek island. It’s a hard, barren, stony, inhospitable place with a few patches of stunted wind-battered trees, with hardly any soil to grow anything in, and a derelict lighthouse with mud floors and dripping ceilings and a lamp which won’t light.

But this makes the moments when the rain stops and the sun comes out, or the sudden quiet when the wind drops, all the more impermanent, fragile and important.

The lighthouse-keeper

… isn’t there. That’s the point. No one knows who he was or where he went or why. His absence drips from the rainy eaves of the abandoned lighthouse. Moominpappa discovers poems the lighthouse-keeper had scribbled in charcoal on the walls of the lamp room. Still others he’d written and then feverishly scribbled over. Why? What drove this lonely man in his high house overlooking the never-still grey sea? Moominpappa discovers the lighthouse-keeper’s old notebook and skips though it looking for clues, but it only has records of wind speeds and directions. Moominpappa starts keeping his own diary.

Moominmamma starts painting on the lighthouse wall all the flowers and shrubs she left at home in Moomin Valley. In one hallucinatory moment, as the others are coming into the room, she steps smartly into her painting, hiding behind a painted tree and watching her family from inside the wall. In fact, she curls up and goes to sleep inside her mural and the others get so concerned they set off on a search party for her round the island.

By the time they get back Moominmamma has stepped out of the mural and is calmly making a towel. From then on she starts painting copies of herself into the mural of an increasingly large and brightly coloured garden.

‘Well, that really is the last word in madness,’ says Little My, and it’s hard not to agree that madness, a really genuine insane paranoia, fear and anxiety – stalk all through these pages.

The old fisherman

There is one inhabitant of the island, though – an old fisherman who lives in a concrete hut right out on a point at the extreme other end of the island. His boat goes past while Moominpappa is fishing and he tries to engage him in conversation but the old boy just mutters and won’t reply. Towards the end of the novel, a really massive storm blows up and the sea sweeps away the old man’s hut leaving him quivering under his upturned boat. Moomintroll and Moominpappa rope themselves together and one swims out to the point, once he’s safe the other swims out too. It gives both the Moomins a reassuring sense that they have somehow overcome the sea, which Moominpappa generally finds so troubling and incomprehensible.

They fetch the old man to safety, give him a tot of whiskey and some hot coffee but he refuses to stay in the lighthouse. Then they find out his birthday is coming up and Moominmama sets about making a cake and presents.

In the end

I haven’t yet mentioned a slightly nightmareish element of the story which is that Moomintroll wakes one night in his secret glade to find that it is moving. The entire glade, the woods, the trees, have pulled up their roots and are slowly moving up away from the sea. In a freakish moment Moomintroll thinks he sees the very sand of the beach moving upwards. They are all scared of the Groke. Every living thing is moving up closer to the lighthouse, for safety. The others notice it, too.

A juniper was moving slowly through the heather like an undulating green carpet. Moominpappa scrambled out of its way, and stood stock-still, frozen to the spot. He could see the island moving, a living thing crouching on the bottom of the sea, helpless with fear. ‘Fear is a terrible thing, Moominpappa thought. ‘It can come suddenly and take hold of everything…’ (p.192)

When Moominpappa puts his ear to the ground, he believes he can hear the beating heart of the island palpitating with fear.

Fear.

In the last ten pages several things happen. Moominpappa goes to the steepest cliff and tells the sea off for terrifying the poor little island. Doesn’t it give the sea pleasure to break and crash over its rocks? Well, stop being such a bully! Almost as if in apology, out of the chastened sea come some rather lovely planks, good for making shelves out of. He and the family quickly rescue them from the waves.

Moomintroll has been going down to the beach to confront the motionless, unspeaking Groke, not in aggression but in eerie silence, taking with him the lit lamp which she so worships. Now the family have run out of paraffin to light it. One nightfall Moomintroll goes down to the beach anyway and an odd thing happens: the Groke dances with delight. It wasn’t the lamp, she is just happy that someone wants to see her. After she has drifted away in the usual spooky manner, Moomintroll goes stands where she was and discovers the sand isn’t frozen as it usually is. Has she… has the Groke… stopped killing things with her coldness? Was all that was needed a little love?

Lastly, they find the old fisherman hiding and – much against his will – persuade him to come up to the lighthouse for a party. He has to close his eyes and take Moominmamma’s hand to enter the lighthouse, which he clearly has a great aversion to. He doesn’t want to go up the stairs to the main room.

But once there, he begins to thaw. He sips and then drinks a whole cup of coffee. He accepts the presents they’ve wrapped for him. He notices the bird’s nest they’ve taken out of the chimney. He spots the jigsaw puzzle they’ve been struggling with for months on a table, goes over and completes it in a few swift moves. He asks for the lighthouse-keeper’s hat – which Moominpappa has been wearing – back. In fact in the last few pages we watch him metamorphose back into the lighthouse-keeper because… that is who he is!

Somehow things have clicked back into place. The sea, if not tamed, has been understood. The lighthouse-keeper has, somehow, been cured and restored. The Groke, of all creatures, somehow seems happy. Moominpappa walks down to the sea feeling wonderfully alive. And as he stares at the ever-restless sea, communing with it, the lighthouse lamp suddenly comes on.

Thoughts

This is very clearly intended as a Happy Ending and maybe it ties up enough loose ends to please children readers. But I think it is forced.

Towards the end of his life my father developed dementia. You and I may be puzzled and unhappy and blocked and frustrated by something, but we have the mental wherewithal to think it through, discuss it with others, and find solutions or just move on. What I saw in my father – and in some other people I’ve known who’ve developed mental illness – is they lose that ability to work things through. They become stuck or trapped by even simple things, and then terrified because they think they’ll never get out.

In my experience, even seriously depressed people can be shown a way out by modern medication and once they’re out you can develop techniques to make that roadway out of unhappiness as wide and easy as possible. Just knowing there is a way out immediately reduces the level of stress they experience when they next go into a black depression.

But the really ill, or demented, can’t find a way out and are caught in a bewildering and terrifying series of traps with no hope of escape. Hence the wailing, the panic attacks, the desperate need to share their burden, even though they can’t put it into words any more.

Maybe I’m overdoing it, but on every other page of this 200-page book there are words like fear, terror, anxiety, small, worry, helpless, and prolonged descriptions of the characters – especially Moominpappa – trying to grasp the situation, trying to act the hero or strong family man or expert on the sea, in order to properly, fully become himself – and failing, failing, failing. And the more Moominmamma and Moomintroll indulge him and say ‘Yes, dear’ the worse it gets. Nobody understands!

Taken along with the disturbing story in the previous book, The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters, this novel goes a long way to eclipse the happy, carefree impression given by the earlier, genuinely happy Moomin stories.

Illustrations

None of the illustrations are as clean and crisp as those in the earlier books; but then they aren’t as sketchy and half-finished as those in Tales of Moominvalley. Somewhere in-between. And some – if you identify with the rather tortured, anxious mood of much of the writing, as I certainly did – have an unprecedented intensity.

Related links

The Moomin books

1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November

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by Simon on November 22, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 22, 2017

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Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson (1957)

Moomins hibernate from November to April, but not this winter. A stray moonbeam wakens Moomintroll and he can’t get back to sleep. He tugs at Moominmamma, but she is dead to the world. Thus he is condemned to go exploring the mysterious and rather scary, silent, snow-covered world of winter, beginning with the mysterious pair of eyes under the cold sink in the kitchen. The Dweller Under The Sink.

He meets Too-tickey, a plump practical person in a red-and-white striped jumper, who lives in the Moomins’ bathing house during the winter, with a suite of shrews who are so shy and retiring they have become completely invisible. When they serve dinner it looks like the plates and bowls are floating.

Little My is woken by a brainless squirrel nipping at her sleeping bag, gets up and quickly adapts to the new conditions. She cuts holes in a tea cosy and borrows a Moomin tea tray to go tobogganing. Little My emerged in the last book, Moominsummer Madness, as a favourite character. Very small, very feisty, she looks forward to disasters and embarrassments with relish. A canny contrast to the timid, over-polite Moomintroll.

Back in the cold, empty Moomin house, a spooked Moomintroll discovers random objects have disappeared, including a tea cosy and a tray. Outside he discovers someone has built an enormous snow horse with a broom for a tail and small mirrors for eyes, which disconcert the young Moomin. Too-Ticky refuses to be worried or upset, and tells Moomintroll about the Great Cold that is coming, and begins to sing a winter song.

Suddenly Moomintroll snaps and starts bawling out a song of summer. He is so lonely, so wants someone to talk to, someone from the summer world to share memories with. At that moment there’s a swoosh and out of nowhere flies a high-speed tea tray which knocks him over into the snow. He hears cackling laughter which can only come from one person, Little My!

He gushes with relief at having a friend from the summer days but, characteristically, Little My doesn’t give a cuss for his sentimental maunderings – she wonders whether greasing the tin with candle wax will make it go faster. Too-ticky immediately joins in with suggestions. Moomintroll looks at them both and reluctantly realises he has to join their world.

Too-ticky warns all the snow animals, namely the brainless squirrel, that the Lady of the Cold is coming.

Too-ticky, Moomintroll and Little My retreat to the bathing house and fuel up the stove, then go out to scan the horizon. There is one among many, many beautifully simple and evocative descriptions of this mysterious midwinter landscape.

They went out onto the landing-stage and sniffed towards the sea. The evening sky was green all over, and all the world seemed to be made of thin glass. All was silent, nothing stirred, and slender stars were shining everywhere and twinkling in the ice. It was terribly cold. (p.46)

Descriptions which transported me as a child and which I still find powerful and evocative as an adult.

They retreat inside the bathing house as the Lady of the Cold walks by, beautiful and terrible, shedding freezing rays in her path. They watch her stop to tickle the brainless squirrel under the chin and he drops, frozen solid. Moomintoll is upset; Little My wonders if she can make a muff out of its tail!

They hold an impromptu funeral procession for the brainless squirrel, laying its frozen body at the feet of the snow horse. To their surprise, the snow horse comes to life, chucks the squirrel onto its back and goes cantering and neighing over the frozen lake and into the distance. Moomintroll feels oppressed by a strange magic he doesn’t understand. He asks Too-Tickey to get his old blue bath gown out of the cupboard in the bathing house. Too-Tickey makes him turn his back and promise never, ever, ever to open the cupboard door himself. She hands him the gown and Moomintroll rummages in it for some memory of happy summer days. He finds a pebble from the beach, perfectly round and smooth.

He closed his paws round the pebble. Its roundness held all the security of summer. He could even imagine that it was still a little warm from lying in the sun. (p.50)

The Moomin books are full of unexpectedly poignant and moving moments like this, unnecessary to the plot, but bathing them in a wonderful sense of human feeling, depths of feeling and oddities of feeling, which you don’t often encounter even in supposedly ‘adult’ fiction.

Moomintroll goes along to the great Midwinter Fire. Too-tickey explains that this ritual marks the return of the sun. Hosts of strange creatures dance and frolic round an enormous bonfire but Moomintroll, once again, feels left out, a spectator at other people’s festivities. The Dweller Under the Sink is there and Moomintroll tries to make friends with it but the little furry thing doesn’t speak his language and becomes progressively more irritated by Moomintroll’s clumsy attempts at friendship. ‘Radamsah!’ it exclaims. ‘Radamsah! RADAMSAH!’ and scuttles off.

Then the Groke comes. The Groke wanders the world trying to be warm but takes with her everywhere her eerie, extinguishing cold. She sits on the fire to warm herself but there is a great ssssssss and when the Groke gets up the fire has frozen. She ambles over to Moomintroll’s lamp, goes to hold it and puts it out.  The winter creatures disperse. The fire ceremony is over.

It’s worth pointing out how many of these characters are female. Little My is a feisty, fearless little tomboy. Too-ticky is an imperturbably practical female (apparently based on Jansson’s female partner, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä). The Groke in her bewildered search for warmth, is female. And so too is the tall and terribly beautiful Lady of the Cold. And underpinning the whole narrative is the calm, accepting figure of Moominmamma who occasionally mutters reassurance to her son, even in her deep winter sleep.

I love this femininity of the books. I love the way that, if in doubt, chances are a new character will be female, and interesting. With no special pleading or fussing, Jansson offers a bewitching array of female types and possibilities.

Next day Moomintroll finds Too-ticky fishing beneath the ice. Sometimes the sea level sinks and leaves a space between water and the frozen ice sheet. She loves to sit on a rock there, quietly fishing and enjoying the view of miles of spectral green under-ice seascape.

I say ‘day’ but one of the things depressing Moomintroll has been the way the wintertime ‘day’ means only a sort of grey smudgy light which appears briefly and is gone. Now, for the first time, actual daylight appears and a thin sliver of red sun crosses the frozen horizon. He dances and sings and slides about on the ice. Little My watches him with disdain. Then the sun disappears back below the horizon. ‘Well, you wouldn’t expect it to come all at one, would you?’ says Too-tickey.

Angry and frustrated Moomintroll storms off to the bathing house and does what he’s been told not to, wrenches open the cupboard door. Is there some terrible monster behind it? No. A little grey thing is sitting there staring at him, then scuttles for the door. A remorseful Moomintroll tells Too-tickey what he’s done, she tuts and explains that the wizened old troll is his ancestor, the Moomin ancestor from 1,000 years ago.

It is another one of those breathtakingly odd and imaginative moments which fill this (and the other) books. Wow.

Moomintroll is appalled by this wizened old spectre and rushes home to leaf through the family album for reassurance. Yes, there they all are, generations of fine upstanding Moomins, big-snouted and formally dressed. Surely their ancestor can’t have been that funny little hairy thing. But then he hears a jingling in the chandelier.

When Moomintroll approaches, it scoots into the cold stove and slams the door behind it. Discombobulated, Moomintroll climbs out of the attic window and down the rope ladder he’s arranged over the surrounding snowdrift, to go see the others. Little My is waiting with a caustic word, as usual.

‘Well, how d’you like Grandfather!’ Little My shouted from her sledge-slide.
‘An excellent person,’ Moomintroll remarked with dignity. ‘In an old family like ours people know how to behave.’ Suddenly he felt very proud of having an ancestor. (p.73)

Dry humour. Character-based humour.

That night the ancestor rearranges every single item in the Moomin house to suit its tastes, hanging all the pictures upside down. In the morning Moomintroll finds this strangely reassuring and makes a new base for himself in the cosy space behind the stove. Maybe they are more closely related than he first thought.

Although the sun rises a little higher each day it is still bitterly cold and the frozen valley starts to see the arrival of refugees from the cold. Sorry-oo the dog comes howling along with a Little Creep, a distressed Fillyjonk and many others. Little My lets on about the big supply of jam stashed in Moomin house and the starving creatures beg Moomintroll for food. Reluctantly, Moomintroll excavates a tunnel through the snow to a window of Moomin house and finds himself doling out provisions to an ever-growing horde of visitors.

Brashest of all the new arrivals is a loud sporty Hemulen, who arrives skiing, blaring on a trumpet and wearing a jazzy, striped yellow jumper. He tries to organise everyone for winter sports, insists on early starts and cold baths in the frozen river. All the other creatures hate him; they want to curl up next to fires.

The Hemulen teaches Little My to ski. She is of course a natural, learns everything she can, and then goes off by herself to the highest mountains to take insane risks. By contrast the Hemulen only manages to get Moomintroll onto skis once and he has a disaster, his legs getting all criss-crossed and crashes into a deep snowdrift.

The creatures all skulk away to hide with Too-tickey under the ice. The Hemulen tries to recruit Sorry-oo but even the sad dog slinks away. Sorry-oo dreams of running with the wolves he hears howling every night.

In a comic but typically touching sequence, Too-ticky and Moomintroll agree that they’ve got to get rid of the sporty Hemulen who is driving everyone nuts, and suggest they tell him the Lonely Mountains are the best place ever for skiing. ‘But the Lonely Mountains are all crags and precipices,’ Moomintroll wails. ‘He’ll love it,’ Too-ticky replies in her no-nonsense way.

So a bit later Moomintroll stiffens his nerve and, as agreed, sets about telling the Hemulen what fabulous skiing there is in the Lonely Mountains. But as the Hemulen gets more excited, Moomintroll feels more guilty about lying to him until he snaps, abruptly reversing his story, back-tracking and telling the Hemulen how dangerous it would be in the mountains, and in his gushing guilt goes on to tell him how much they all like him and they don’t want him to go, anyway. The Hemulen is touched and promises to stay. Moomintroll is humiliated at his failure and wanders off into a snowstorm which, to his surprise, he finds rather bracing and lifts his mood.

Eventually making it back to the bathing house, Moomintroll finds all the creatures gathered round the fire and Too-ticky gently mocks him. They’ve heard about his miserable failure to persuade the Hemulen to leave.

More importantly, Salome the Little Creep has got lost in the snowstorm. (They don’t know it but Salome had overheard Too-ticky and Moomintroll conspiring to send the Hemulen to the Lonely Mountains. She set off to warn him not to go, but is too small and got caught in the snowstorm.)

They set off to find her but it is the Hemulen who, now he stops to think about it, realises that she often pestered him for a chat and for advice on winter sports but he was in too much of a hurry to listen. Now he feels guilty and pads over the snow in his tennis-racket snowshoes seeking her trail. Hemulens are good at this kind of thing and so he quickly comes to the spot where she’s buried in snow and gently excavates her, tucking her up in his warm jumper and taking her back to the bathing house. All is well.

And you know what? He tells Moomintroll he’s going off to the Lonely Mountains anyway, yes yes they’re dangerous but the snowstorm will have filled in the crevices and, besides, think of the fresh air! Off he sets, blowing his Hemulen horn, while Moomintroll and Too-ticky exchange glances.

Meanwhile the little doggy Sorry-oo has decided to make his fantasy come true and has set off for the woods at dusk determined to join the wolf pack. It gets dark. The howling of the wolves gets closer. Yellow eyes appear in the black under the trees. He realises he’s made a terrible mistake.

Just at that moment, as the danger is drawing near, he hears the blowing of the Hemulen horn and the big yellow-jumpered Hemulen yomps into the clearing on his snow shoes, as the wolf eyes disappear. ‘Ah, nice doggy,’ he says, ‘waiting here for me. Coming to the Lonely Mountains with me?’ and the Hemulen yomps off with Sorry-oo scampering behind him.

This extended sequence, starting with the little creep’s unrequited devotion to him and then the big blustering Hemulen realising he’s ignored her and, almost carelessly, saving her life, and then – again without realising it – blundering into the clearing and saving Sorry-oo’s life – is not only sweet and touching but feels like it’s telling you something quite profound about the confusions and unintended complexities of life, all cast in a happy mood but none the less moving for that.

The creatures celebrate by having a wild winter olympics.

Then they all pack up and start drifting home. Too-tickey turns her red cap inside out to mark the approach of spring. Moomintroll surveys the Moomin house – what a mess! He struggles with the snowed-in front door and finally manages to open it against the weakening snowdrift. A big night cold gale sweeps in the door and through the house. ‘The room was filled with the smell of night and firs.’

In the final chapter spring slowly arrives. Every day the sun rises a little higher. Jansson’s observations of the changes in the natural world are quite marvellous. How the red bark of the birch trees slowly becomes noticeable through their snow covering, how the sun melts the drifts creating intricate dripping honeycombs of ice.

Little My is out skating at top speed over the ice when Too-ticky and Moomintroll, standing on the shore, hear far out at sea the first reports of the ice cracking and breaking up. On the horizon are angry white waves. Black cracks spread over the thick ice. Little My, the devil, skates right out to the outermost extent of the ice sheet, where the sea is lapping, just to see it and then turns and skates at top speed towards the shore. The description of ice cracking and fissuring as Little My skates away from it is thrilling.

She’s nearly at the shore when the entire ice sheet disintegrates into little floes. Moomintroll goes jumping out from floe to floe to rescue her. Little My climbs on his head and clutches his ears as he jumps back towards the shore. At the very last jump he slips and falls into the freezing sea (Little My, of course, skipping free to land at the last moment – her sort always come out on top).

Too-ticky helps pull Moomintroll out and takes him to the bathing-hut but Moomintroll bad-temperedly refuses her ministrations and insists on going home. He snuggles down under duvets and sneezes loudly.

And it is the distressed sneeze of her son, not the howling storm or the winter snows nor the cracking ice, but the sound of her son in distress, which wakes Moominmamma.

She quickly takes everything in hand, not minding at all about the mess, fixing Moomintroll a cold cure and, while he sleeps, tidying up. When he wakes he feels better, and notices everything is back in its proper place, the pictures have been rehung and there is the cosy sound of washing dishes from the kitchen. Little My and Too-ticky have told Moominmamma what a hero Moomintroll was to save her. She is glad the jam was all used to feed hungry people. She is an unflappable, calm, accepting force of nature.

Next day the rest of the Moomin clan are woken up by the sound of Too-ticky playing an old-fashioned barrel organ. One by one they come to life and set about their habitual occupations, mother making food, father off to fix something, the Snork maiden finds the first crocus of spring. Moomintroll is so overcome with happiness that he breaks into a run down to the now-completely-defrosted bathing house and sits watching the waves of the sea, remembering when it was all solid ice stretching to the horizon.

Deeper style

All the books have magical marvellous moments but I remember as a child being that much more entranced by Moominland Midwinter. All of it is strange and uncanny.

In the previous books the extended Moomin family or Sniff or Snufkin are there to reassure Moomintroll and give him courage. Here, he has to survive by himself in an alien landscape. None of it is genuinely scary or threatening; but it is strange and uncanny throughout. If children’s fiction is meant to teach anything, this book presents numerous scenes in which Moomintroll learns to overcome his fears and nervousness, to be sensitive to the wishes and personalities of other people very different from himself (Too-ticky, Little My, the Hemulen), to make his own decisions, to become a person.

Which is why the final chapter about the return of spring contains paragraphs of real wisdom, paragraphs which could come from a grown-ups’ book.

Now came spring but not at all as he had imagined its coming. He had thought that it would deliver him from a strange and hostile world, but now it was simply a continuation of his new experiences, of something he had already conquered and made his own. (p.118)

And a little later, when Moomintroll asks Too-tickey why she wasn’t more sympathetic to him when they first me:

Too-tickey shrugged her shoulders. ‘One has to discover everything for oneself,’ she replied. ‘And get over it all alone.’

Marvellous Moominmamma

Moominland Midwinter is dedicated to Jansson’s mother. Her avatar in the stories, Moominmamma, even though she doesn’t much appear and certainly doesn’t wake up until the very end – hovers over the whole story, a protecting guardian for lonely Moomintroll, the wisdom of the house, the wisdom of countless female ancestors.

This female inheritance is brought out more explicitly than in any previous book. When Moomintroll creeps up to his mother’s sleeping body and asks her where the things they’ll need for the squirrel’s funeral are, even in her sleep Moominmamma is wonderfully helpful and reassuring:

Then Moominmamma answered, from the depths of her womanly understanding of all that preserves tradition… (p.52)

When, right at the end, Moominmamma has woken up, she not only swiftly restores the house to complete order, rehanging the paintings, putting the furniture back in place, sweeping, dusting and tidying up, she makes a special traditional remedy for Moomintroll, who caught a cold rescuing Little My from the breaking-up ice.

She found a few sticks of wood from behind the slop-pail. She took a bottle of currant syrup  from her secret cupboard, as well as a powder and a flannel scarf.
When the water boiled she mixed a strong influenza medicine of sugar and ginger, and an old lemon that used to lie behind the tea-cosy on the topmost shelf but one.
There was no tea-cosy, nor any teapot. But Moominmamma never noticed that. For safety’s sake she mumbled a short charm over the influenza medicine. That was something her grandmother had taught her…. (p.129)

A bit later Moominmamma comes out to join her son and the other little ones playing snowballs. As she makes one she casually mentions that she’s not upset about her entire store of jam having been eaten by the guest, nor the furniture being rearranged or having gone missing. The house will look a lot less cluttered without it! Moomintroll watches and listens to her and a great feeling wells up in his chest to have such a wonderful wonderful mother.

Moominmamma scooped up a handful of snow and made a snowball. She threw it clumsily as mothers do, and it plopped to the ground not very far away.
‘I’m no good at that,’ said Moominmamma with a laugh. ‘Even Sorry-oo would have made a better throw.’
‘Mother, I love you terribly,’ said Moomintroll. (p.134)

And it’s hard, at the end of this short but quite intense, wonderfully imaginative and sometimes quite moving story, not to feel that this is Jansson’s heartfelt tribute to her own mother. Did any mother ever have a better tribute than the Moomin books?

Related links

The Moomin books

1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November

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by Simon on November 20, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 20, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/moominland-midwinter-tove-jansson/

Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson (1954)

The plot is a little easier to summarise than the previous books. It is an unusually hot June, there are grumblings in the ground, the phlegmatic Moomins say it’s the volcano, drat all this soot. Cracks appear in the ground and frighten Moomintroll and the Snork maiden as they walk in the woods.

Then there is a particularly big crash and far out at sea an enormous tsunami is formed which comes rushing in over the beach and floods Moomin Valley.

The water level in Moominhouse slowly rises and the family enjoys drilling a hole in the drawing room floor to look down into the flooded kitchen.

They become friends with Misabel and the Whomper, refugees from the flood who are floating past on a tree. Misabel turns out to be a young person who cries almost all the time. The water continues rising till they are all forced to retreat right up to the roof of the Moominhouse. From here they watch a large object they’ve been observing for a while, coming closer and closer. It is a theatre, cut loose from its foundations (though none of the Moomin family has ever seen one before).

As the theatre floats past they all step aboard and it floats merrily on, past the Moominhouse and beyond. They set about exploring. They discover how the curtains and the backdrops work, the prompter’s box (which becomes the larder) and secret corridors leading to changing rooms, costume rooms and a room full of wigs.

There’s a strong female element about this story: we have the trio of the Snork maiden, the Mymble’s daughter and Misabel, who all comb their hair, fuss about their looks and are quick to be a bit hurt, wandering off among the strange building to discover treasure (wigs and gowns!)

For the first few days they’re aware of strange snickerings from the darkness and practical jokes – for example, all the stage lights suddenly flaring on at once. After a few days Emma the old stage rat appears, a downtrodden cleaner who complains that they only ever leave her porridge in a bowl, and she hates porridge!

The theatre floats into a forest and Moomintroll says he’d love to sleep up a tree, so they moor the theatre and Moomintroll and the Snork maiden climb into a high tree and make themselves comfortable. Everyone goes to sleep. In the middle of the night Emma the old theatre rat, poking about, finds the makeshift hawser Moominpappa has made – the rope to the tree tied round his stick which is poked into the prompter’s box  – and throws it away. Slowly the theatre drifts onwards, leaving Moomintroll and the Snork maiden – asleep and all unknowing – abandoned.

Next morning Moomintroll and the Snork maiden awaken desolated to discover the theatre and their whole family has floated away. The Snork maiden asks Moomintroll to protect her; maybe they can play a game that he’s kidnapped her. He feels all manly. They go exploring through the connected treetops and eventually come – oh bliss! – to dry land.

They discover little forest creatures lighting fires and dancing, for it is Midsummer Eve, an important festival in Scandinavian countries. They remember the loving preparations of his family for this festival. The Snork maiden says girls had to pick nine types of flower and place them under their pillows to make their dreams come true.

Meanwhile, the Moomin family wake up to the calamity that they have sailed far away from Moomintroll and the Snork maiden. Moominmamma is, for once, inconsolable and Misabel is in floods of tears. Little My is exploring the trap door which looks down into the black waves when the theatre runs aground on dry land with a bump and she is tipped into the sea. She is so tiny that she floats and soon sees a biscuit tin and a work basket floating by. She picks the work basket, climbs in and curls up among the rolls of wool and knitting needles and falls fast asleep.

The work basket drifts slowly ashore and comes to rest in a bed of reeds. Now it just so happens that Snufkin – Moomintroll’s oldest bestest friend, who he met in Comet in Moominland and who then left to travel the world in Finn Family Moomintroll – is quietly fishing nearby. He sees ther basket come to rest, discovers Little My, wakens her, pops her in his pocket and carries her away. She knows the words to his favourite tune on the mouth organ, ‘All small beasts should have bows in their tails’.

It turns out that Snufkin has a plan to discomfit his perennial enemy – the Park Keeper! The Park Keeper and the Park Wardress are responsible for banning Fun, for putting up signs in the park which read ‘No Smoking’, ‘Do not sit on the grass’, ‘Laughing and whistling strictly prohibited’ etc and generally intimidating all the little children who go there into sitting motionless and silent.

Snufkin has a cunning plan. He tells Little My that the Hattifatteners actually grow from seeds!! but only if they’re sown on Midsummer Eve.

Little My is filled with her usual naughty glee! She asks to come and watch and so, as the sun sets, Snufkin carefully moves round the perimeter of the park scattering handfuls of Hattifattener seeds. And they start to sprout and tingle with electricity. And before you know it they are chasing the Park Keeper and Lady Wardess away, the latter yelping from little electric shocks.

Then Snufkin tears down all the signs which ban things, makes a bonfire out of them and burns them to ashes. All the time the little ones from the woods, the ‘woodies’, are looking at with him with big eyes. ‘Well, go and play,’ he shouts at them – but instead they follow him, and as he leaves the park and heads home he is trailed by a posse of twenty-four little ones. Oh dear. He hadn’t counted on this at all.

Meanwhile Moomintroll and the Snork maiden come across the lonely Fillyjonk, crying and wailing in her house where she’s laid the table for a Midsummer Feast but, as usual, she knows her uncle and his wife won’t come, as they always don’t.

‘Well, you don’t have to invite people who refuse invitations, you know,’ says Moomintroll confidently. ‘Really?’ says the Fillyjonk, and suddenly feels free and liberated 🙂 At which, she promptly invites Moomintroll and the Snork maiden to join her for the meal.

After dining and drinking well they set out to look for the Midsummer Eve fire and stumble across a load of old park signs which have been torn down (aha – so they are not far at all from Snufkin and Little My). The Snork maiden tells the Fillyjonk about more folk traditions – like you must turn round seven times and walk backwards up to a well and the face you see in it will be the face of the person you’re going to marry!

Alas, when they daintily and gaily carry out this ritual, first picking sweet summer flowers, then turning then walking backwards to the well, the face they see in it – is the face of a very angry Park Keeper who promptly arrests them for burning all his signs!

In chapter eight, the distraught Moomin family settle down to make the most of it without Moomintroll and the Snork maiden. They have run aground in Spruce Creek and the theatre is sloping at an alarming angle. Emma reveals she was once married to a Mr Fillyjonk but he passed away (aha, that links to the sad Fillyjonk in the clearing who invites her uncle and wife to Midsummer supper but they never come – same people).

Emma comes out of her shell and explains to everyone what a THEATRE is along with diagrams. Moominpappa gets fired up to write a play.

THE LION’S BRIDES or BLOOD WILL OUT

Then it is the afternoon of the first dress rehearsal. Everyone is fussing and panicking and wants their lines rewritten. Emma the old stage rat has stopped being grumpy and turns out to be amazingly calm and reassuring and supportive. She is in her element.

This chapter, complete with all the characters speaking Moominpappa’s heroic blank verse, and missing every cue, dropping the props and bumping into each other, is really funny.

Meanwhile the Hemulen policeman is tremendously enjoying having three prisoners in his gaol (Moomintroll, the Snork maiden, the Fillyjonk). But when passing birds drop playbills advertising the forthcoming play at the floating theatre he remembers the gay days of his youth and realises he has to go. He deputes guarding the prisoners to a very timid Hemulen relation and goes to get dressed. Quite quickly Moomintroll and the Snork maiden persuade the little hemulen to take them to her place for tea and cakes and they offer practical advice on her crocheting. Then after tea they simply announce that they are not going back to prison but to the play. Oh dear. She says she’d better go along, too.

Meanwhile the playbills have fallen on the Fillyjonk’s house (abandoned because she’s in prison) which Snufkin and his twenty-four woodies have moved into. He announces he’ll take them to see a play. Thus Snufkin and his woodies, the Hemulen Policeman, and Moomintroll, the Snork maiden and the Fillyjonk all row out that evening to the theatre in Spruce Creek, along with lots of other little forest folk and watch the first half of the play from an armada of little boats. They gaze at Moominpappa’s masterpiece in blank verse in complete perplexity.

But when the (stage) lion starts chasing the Mymble’s daughter, Little My (not understanding it’s all pretend) leaps up on the stage and bites his leg. This leads the entire cast to stop acting and greet Little My with tears of relief – but the audience in the boats, in their simplicity, think this is all part of the play which has – thank goodness – stopped being performed in impenetrable verse and is suddenly being told in normal language. From what the audience can make out, the play seems to be about a family which has been split up and is now being tearfully reunited. Ah, isn’t that nice. They applaud.

This impression is all the more confirmed when Moomintroll rows up to the stage and climbs aboard. Tears, hugs, laughter, the audience of wood folk applauds wildly this happy ending, then starts getting up on stage and joining in themselves.

The Hemulen Policeman spots his prisoners and also climbs up on stage. Just as he is accusing Moomintroll et al of tearing down the signs, Snufkin announces that it was he who pulled up the forbidding notices and burned them all. In the ensuing dramatic pause, Snufkin evades the Policeman’s grasp, jumps into his boat – Moomintroll jumps into the creek and climbs into Snufkin’s boat – and they row off into the darkness leaving pandemonium behind them.

Snufkin hides his boat in an inlet and they hear the big heavy Hemulen Policeman row clean past, not spotting them. Snufkin tells Moomintroll to go back to the theatre and fetch the others, leave everything, meet him back here, he’ll take them home.

Next thing the entire family is in Snufkin’s rowing boat as he lazily rows them back into Moomin Valley. The flood waters are finally retreating, exposing all the well-loved landmarks. They’ve been rowing for three days. They left Misable and the Whomper at the theatre, she to act in grand tragedies where she’ll get to cry every night, and he to be the practical stage manager, which will suit him down to the ground. The little woodies will be looked after by the Fillyjonk who was very lonely before. The Little Hemulen is still cowering in the middle of Snufkin’s rowing boat.

Now Snufkin’s boat runs aground on grassy banks covered with summer flowers and they wade through the receding waters back to Moomin House. At the last moment there’s a police whistle and the Hemulen and several assistant constables corner them. But it turns out that the Little Hemulen had all this time been doing the ‘punishment’ which Snufkin would have been sentenced to, namely writing out ‘Strictly forbidden’ five thousand times!

She hands the punishment over to the Hemulen Policeman who is non-plussed. She also says that Snufkin apologises fulsomely (and when Snufkin goes to protest, sharply shuts him up). Well, hmmm, alright, the Hemulen Policeman grumpily admits he’ll have to let him go and whistles his men together. The Little Hemulen tells the Moomin family she’s going back with him. She thanks the Moomins for their kind suggestions about her crocheting, and all the hemulens leave.

And so the Moomins finally arrive home, after another satisfying adventure.

Everything felt right… It was if nothing had ever happened and as if no danger could ever threaten them again. (p.142)

Comments

I always felt that the intrusion of the Hobgoblin flying round the solar system broke the fourth wall of Finn Family Moomintroll. Basically a science fiction idea, it felt like it came from a different world than the cosy woods full of the snug little creatures of Moomin Valley.

Similarly, The Exploits of Moominpappa is a) a bit much about men and their pompous pretensions b) also has a kind of ex machina device – the enormous dragon, Edward the Booble – who is dragged in at key moments to sort out the plot.

These divagations in the scale of the plot didn’t seriously trouble me when I was a boy, maybe I liked them. But as an adult I find Moominsummer Madness has much more unity of tone: there are some striking coincidences but they are acceptable, they are part of the Moomin world, they don’t require giants or Hobgoblins from space to interfere. The whole thing feels much more of a piece, more unified, hugely more content and homely.

If you could bottle family love this is how it would taste.

Related links

The moomin books

1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November

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by Simon on November 19, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Childrens
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 19, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/19/moominsummer-madness-tove-jansson/

The Exploits of Moominpappa by Tove Jansson (1950)

As a father of a family and owner of a house I look with sadness on the stormy youth I am about to describe. I feel a tremble of hesitation in my paw as I poise my memoir-pen! (p.7)

The tone and style of this, the fourth Moomintroll book, is notably different from the previous ones. It is, after all, told in the first person by Moominpappa himself and this is why it is cast in an entertainingly pompous and self-important style.

The characters we’re introduced to also speak less clearly, with more mannerisms and clipped adult speech, than the essentially childish dialogue of the earlier books. It is a children’s view of the silly mannerisms of adults. Hodgkins in particular has the style of speaking sometimes called ‘telegraphese’, which appeared in Dickens’s Mr Jingle or Jimmy in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Would be interesting to know whether he speaks like this in the original or whether it is the translator’s idea of a stiff-upper lipped, English military type:

‘No dinghy,’ said Hodgkins. ‘Takes too long to weigh anchor. Motor’s tricky. Too late.’ (p.39)

‘Hattifattener,’ said Hodgkins, ‘Never seen one? No peace, no rest. Always travelling. Travel and travel without a word. Dumb.’ (p.50)

That said, almost all the chapters cut between two narrative voices: one part is Moominpappa’s memoirs (which, we learn, he is reading aloud as he writes them, to the young persons in the household), humorously pompous, self-important and moralising – and another voice, that of the familiar omniscient narrator, which shows the (generally humorous) reactions of the children he’s reading to, Moomintroll, Sniff, Snufkin et al.

It’s just as well because the style of the memoirs is very different from the norm; it’s funny for spells, but it’s a relief to come back to the familiar, warm tones of Tove.

The plot

Glorious times! Immortal deeds!

Baby Moominpappa is left wrapped in a newspaper on the steps of the Home for Moomin Foundlings. This is run by the stern Hemulen who believes in astrology. As soon as possible he runs away and walks through the scarey woods, until he reaches a clearing where he builds a Moomin house, you know, a good one, with lots of secret corners, balconies and towers.

Bored, he wanders down the stream and bumps into Hodgkins who shows him how to build a waterwheel (there’s an illustration to show how). Hodgkins takes him to the boat he’s built and introduces him to his nephew, the confused young thing with a saucepan on  his head, the Muddler. He has the brainwave of moving Moominpappa’s house onto his boat to create a houseboat.

Moominpappa and (the odd-looking) Hodgkins dandling their feet in the stream

It takes all three quite a lot of effort and when the house falls over on the way out tumbles the Joxter who was hiding inside. He becomes their friend. Now they are a foursome.

The key fact here is that each of the four turns out to be the father of one of the childish characters who accompany Moomintroll. Thus the Joxter is Snufkin’s father and the Muddler is Sniff’s father. As they realise this it makes the interjections and comments of the children animals pointed and comic as they comment on their daddies’ activities. Y ou can see that there’s a kind of practical requirement for this: if it had just been Moominpappa’s memoirs, only Moomintroll would really have been interested in them. By making his friends the fathers of Moomintroll’s friends, the net is widened to a) include everyone b) set up all kinds of comic comments and ironies.

They erect the Moominhouse on the deck of the boat and commission the Muddler to paint it and name it. In the process he paints everything a vivid red, including half the forest and himself. Hodgkins wanted the boat named the Ocean Orchestra which proves beyond the Muddler’s abilities, who writes Oshun Oxtra on the side. Oh well.

The Muddler painting Oshun Oxtra while the Joxter takes a nap

The Muddler makes a nice hot dinner but some of the bric-a-brac in his huge tin of bits and bobs get into it, specifically some cog wheels.Hodgkins isn’t upset, but delighted: the cogs are just what he needed to make the ship go (there’s an illustration to show how they fit into the boat). (The houseboat also has rubber wheels for driving over sandbanks. Hodgkins is that kind of a practical chap!)

Hodgkins, Moominpappa, the Joxter and the Muddler finding cogs in the meal the Muddler’s made

Now how to get it afloat out of the boatyard. Hodgkins takes Moominpappa to meet Edward the Booble. This is a huge, a truly enormous dragon. They persuade him to sit down in the stream, thereby blocking and flooding it. Away Oshun Oxtra speeds on the crest of a wave, down the stream and out towards the sea.

Here they anchor in a bay only to hear scarey sounds from the shore. It is the dreaded Groke out hunting and they can hear one of its victims shrieking for help. The others freeze but Moominpappa goes to the rescue. Since the ship’s dinghy is tied up and this calls for instant action, he chucks the ship’s kettle overboard then leaps into the river and propels it to the shore with his nose. Here the shrieking victim jumps in and Moominpappa noses the heavy kettle back to the Oshun Oxtra.

Glorious feat! Lonely deed! (p.40)

Only when she clambers out does everyone realise that Moominpappa has saved a prim and proper maiden Hemulen. Oh dear. She immediately starts telling them all how to behave, to wash and stand up straight and address her correctly. Suddenly a vast swarm of Niblings swim out to the boat, seize the Maiden Aunt Hemulen, chuck her over the side and swim off with her. The others look at each other shamefacedly but are relieved that she’s gone.

The Oshun Oxtra arrives at the sea and the crew disembark for a typical bit of Jansson exploration and cave-finding conveyed with some of her beautifully pellucid prose.

Now evening came, very slowly and carefully, to give the day ample time to go to bed. Small clouds lay strewn over the sky like dabs of pink whipped cream. They were reflected in the ocean that rested calm and smooth. (p.51)

Hodgkins tells Moominpappa about the Hattifatteners, who sail the ocean and travel the world, deaf and mute, staring with their big eyes, in search of who knows what, and Moominpappa is entranced by this image of eternal voyaging, eternal questing (p.52).

That night they discover everything is sticky including their beds. One of the Niblings was left behind and gnawed through the painter. Oh well. They welcome him onto the crew.

Three little clouds are passing overhead being chased by a black looking gale. They use a rope to lassoo the clouds and rescue them, bringing them down to the ship’s deck where they turn out to be soft and fluffy. This is lucky because an enormous storm blows up which threatens to sink the Oshun Oxtra, but the clouds come in handy as sails which help them run before the storm and weather it.

What joy when the storm has passed and the sun comes out again! It reveals that the Oshun Oxtra has been pretty beaten up and is covered in seaweed and a few sea spooks. Still Moominpappa is happy to have weathered it. They set sail towards an island with a tall spindly mountain sticking up. Too late, they realise it is Edward the Booble and he is not happy with them!

Characteristically the memoir reading stops there, to reveal that Moominpappa was reading this chapter to an enthralled Moomintroll, Sniff and Snufkin by the seaside. As they stroll around suddenly they see a shiny object bobbing in the waves. it is the very top knob of the Oshun Oxtra which must have been floating the seven seas all this time! Moominpappa clutches it tight and goes off alone to have a deep and spiritual moment!

Back in the memoirs, our crew quick-wittedly offer Edward the three soft clouds to soothe his sore bottom (scraped by the gnarly streambed they persuaded him to sit on earlier) and while he is nestling down on them, they make their escape to land and go exploring the island.

First they come across the naughty little Mymble’s daughter in her house of wood planks and leaves, who explains what all the dry stone walls are for and then that her mother (the Mymble) is at the King’s Surprise Garden Party. The Mymble’s daughter tells them he allows his subjects to call him Daddy Jones (though Moominpappa, a stern royalist, will insist on calling him Your Autocratic Highness).

So off they all set to the party which actually is full of surprises – first of all they have to cross a cleft in which is a giant spider (which turns out to be made of spring). On the other side is a big sign reading SCARED – WEREN’T YOU? Then they take to rowing boats to cross a lake but half way across huge water spouts erupt drenching them. There’s a sign on the other side reading WET – AREN’T YOU? and so on.

They take part in the lottery, picking up eggs with numbers painted on them and then Daddy Jones, who is a cheerful bald old man, hands out prizes to all his subjects who he addresses as ‘My dear muddle-headed, fuzzy and thoughtless subjects!’ The party ends with a mad go for all on a merry-go-round.

Next morning they set off to colonise an island in the name of his Autocratic Majesty. It is two miles north of Daddy Jones’s island. They land and unload the Moominhouse, placing it on a high promontory and split up to explore (as always, as in the best summer holidays by the sea).

That night Moominpappa is woken up by creepy footsteps creaking up the stairs. He  hides under the bed. But when the door opens it reveals a soggy ghost who sneezes and apologises. It becomes clear the ghost is full of the best intentions of scaring everyone’s pants off but is very bad at it. They invite him to a Council meeting of the explorers, where he tries to scare them but they end up becoming friends and he joins the gang. They make up a nice bed for him in a packing case, where he snuggles down and gets on with his knitting.

The Joxter, Moominpappa, Hodgkins, the Muddler and the Mymble’s daughter confront the island ghost

The Mymble (who has a vast array of children) gives birth to Little My, who is to go on and have a great career in the later books as a world-class irritant and naughty urchin. Hodgkins has been appointed Royal Surprise Inventor to His Royal Highness Daddy Jones and now unveils the Amphibian, a machine which can fly but is also a submarine.

There is a grand unveiling where all the people come from miles around, our heroes climb in and it flies up into the air. Then Hodgkins depresses the lever and it dives into the depths of the sea. As usual, the sea brings out the most poetic in Jansson as she describes the different shades of seawater as they dive deeper. We overhear the sea creatures discussing this new arrival and declaring it won’t last long when the Sea Hound appears.

The Sea Hound? It appears and all the fishes scarper in fear. The Sea Hound grabs the Amphibian by the tail and begins shaking it with predictable consequences for all our friends inside. Then everything is suddenly still and ominously silent. Until they hear the booming voice of their old friend, Edward the Booble. He has stepped on the Sea Hound by accident. Not only our friends rejoice but all the sea creatures who have lived in fear of the Sea Hound all their lives rejoice and all of them turn on the lamps and flashlights they all have but never turn on for fear of the monster. The entire sea is illuminated by a dazzling display of light!

The sea lit up by the Amphibian and all the other fish turn on their lights

They surface to see a dinghy carrying the eccentric Daddy Jones who tells them to come back to the mainland because the Muddler is getting married! To a Fuzzy!

At this point the excited children interrupt the narration and insist that Moominpappa clarifies their family relationships. So it turns out that the Muddle marries a Fuzzy and they are parents to Sniff – while the Joxter marries the Mymble and they have Snufkin. The children let this soak in. So Little My is Snufkin’s sister! Well, well.

The wedding is a great affair, the entire population turns out for it, the Hemulic Band plays the national anthem – ‘Save our silly people’ – fog horns blare and some kiddies fall into the sea from sheer excitement. It turns out the Muddler invited the Hemulen Aunt and all 7,000 Niblings and when a Packet Boat hoves into sight everyone thinks it must be them. But it turns out that boat is empty apart from one Nibling who delivers a message from the Hemulen Aunt declaring that she has never been happier than living in the Nibling kingdom where she is teaching them the joys of quizzes and multiplication contests.

Momminpappa tells the assembled audience that his memoirs are complete. He has finished.

I believe many of my readers will thoughtfully lift their snout from the pages of this book every once in a while to exclaim: ‘What a Moomin!’ or: ‘This indeed is life!’ (p.8)

All except for one tiny last detail. How he met his wife, the wonderful Moominmamma.

Well, it was Autumn and the gales had started and he was sitting in front of a cosy fire with the Island Ghost, the Mymble, the Muddler and the Fuzzy listening to the seas raging wilder and wilder down by the shore. On an impulse he goes down to confront the tumultuous waves and there, clinging to a spar, is the most perfect of Moomins, Moominmamma, being washed in and dragged out again by the roaring waves. Moominpappa bravely wades in and grabs her, hauling her to shore. ‘My handbag, my handbag,’ she cries. But it is in her hand. Alas her facepowder is all soggy, though. ‘You look beautiful without it,’ says Moominpappa, and a great romance is born.

Moominpappa rescues Moominmamma from a raging storm

And at that, Moominpappa lays down his memoir pen.

There remains only a brief epilogue to the book in which, to everyone’s amazement, there’s a knock at the door and all Moominpappa’s old gang is there, not looking a day older than when he last saw them: Hodgkins, the Muddler and the Fuzzy, the Joxter and the Mymble. Never has the Moomin verandah held so many questions, exclamations and embraces! Hodgkins announces that the new, improved Amphibian is parked outside. Tomorrow they will all go for a flight. ‘Why wait for tomorrow,’ cries Moomintroll. ‘Let’s all go now!’

And in the foggy dawn they all tumbled out in the garden. The eastern sky was a wonderful rose-petal pink, promising a fine clear August day. A new door to the Unbelievable, to the Possible, a new day that can always bring you anything if you have no objections to it. (p.130)

Related links

The Moomin books

1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November

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by Simon on November 18, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Autobiography, Books, Childrens
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Posted by Simon on November 18, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/18/the-exploits-of-moominpappa-tove-jansson/

Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson (1948)

This is the third of the Moomintroll books, published in 1948 and translated into English by Elizabeth Portch in 1950. All the Moomin books bring back lovely memories, the feelings of wonder, adventure and safety I had when I read them as a boy.

The plot

Winter comes and the Moomins eat a last meal before hibernating.

In the spring Moomintroll wakes up to find Snufkin has woken before him and is sitting on the bridge over the little river. They wake little Sniff and decide to go for an adventure, to climb to the top of the nearest mountain and make a cairn of stones there. Instead, when they get to the top they find a big black top hat, which they don’t realise is the Hobgoblin’s magic hat.

(In fact this, the centrepiece of the plot, gives its title to the original Swedish-language version of the book, Trollkarlens hatt, ‘The Magician’s Hat’. [Jansson was Finnish but spoke and wrote in Swedish.])

The first hint of the hat’s magic is when Moomintroll absent-mindedly throws the shell of his hard-boiled egg into it. A while later five fluffy clouds emerge from it and hover in the garden. They are soft as cotton wool so, one by one, Moomintroll, Sniff, Snufkin, the Snork and the Snork maiden climb up on them and discover you can make them move by moving your feet and leaning to either side. Soon they are playing bumper cars on the magic clouds!

They comfort the Hemulen who is crying because he has completed his life’s work of collecting every stamp in the world. After some thought they suggest he starts a new collection (Hemulens need a project to keep them going) of botany. Every plant in the world! Aha! He suddenly beams with happiness and goes off to collect samples.

The Hobgoblin’s Hat shows a darker side when Moomintroll goes to sleep under it and emerges in a completely different shape, as a skinny elf. The others are afraid and then disgusted when he keeps pretending to be their friend Moomintroll. In tears he begs Moominmamma to accept that it is he, Moomintroll. She looks long into the tearful eyes of the stranger and then decides, yes, it is him. Typical of her role as the accepting, comforting, all-wise Mother.

They decide to play a trick on the ant lion who lives on the beach. They capture him and throw him into the hat, which they cover with a Dictionary of Outlandish Words. After a while the hat starts flowing with water (which is what the sand has changed into) and a profusion of peculiar little creatures (which is what the Outlandish Words have changed into) and then a small, bedraggled hedgehog emerges (which is what the ant lion has changed into).

Moominmamma and Moominpappa decide the hat is too dangerous to keep and throw it into the river. Late that night Snufkin wakes up Moomintroll and they go and find the hat has run aground on a little sand bank. Moomintroll wades out to rescue it and discovers that the river water flowing into it is coming out as raspberry juice, and that fish entering it fly out as canaries!

They decide to hide the hat in the cave by the sea which Sniff found in Comet in Moominland. Next morning the Muskrat is peacefully reading his big book, On The Uselessness of Everything when his hammock string breaks and he lands with a bump on the ground. He indignantly tells Moominpappa he can’t put up with the children’s pranks any more and announces he is going off to live in the cave. We follow him as he marches off to the cave, makes himself comfortable, and then settles down for a snooze, first putting his false teeth into the top hat for safekeeping.

Moominpappa only tells the rest of the family about all this at lunchtime, at which Moomintroll and Snufkin let out a squawk and go running towards the beach. On the way they hear a series of screams and pass the Muskrat running the other way. The cave is empty, though the sand is mightily disturbed. The Muskrat never tells anyone what had frightened him so much. We will have to use our imaginations!

Now everyone is down by the sea, they find a washed-up boat in fairly good condition. After some squabbling they name it The Adventure, pack lots of goodies and set sail. The first island they come to is the Lonely Island surrounded by reefs and combers. None of them know that this is the island where the legendary Hattifatteners congregate once a year before setting off on their mysterious odyssey no one knows where (or why).

They split up to go exploring. The Hemulen takes his magnifying glass botanising but stumbles across the clearing where the Hattifatteners hold their gatherings. Suddenly they are closing in on him and he retreats to the pole in the centre of the clearing, then scampers up it to find a barometer at the top.

His screams bring the others who suggest he rocks backwards and forwards to scare the Hattifatteners off. That does the trick but the Hemulen insists on bringing the barometer as a souvenir back to the tents which Moominmamma and Moominpappa have erected on the beach.

A massive and dramatic storm batters the island. Moominmamma tucks everyone up in the safe and cosy tents she has prepared. In the middle of the night Moomintroll is woken up by strange spectral figures moving about in the tent. It is the Hattifatteners, who have been electrically charged by the storm and so are glowing slightly, looking for their barometer. They find it in the Hemulen’s corner, seize it but wake him up and there is much screaming and pandemonium before the Hattifatteners made off.

The Snork maiden discovers to her woe that the electric buzz of the Hattifatteners has singed off her little fringe which she was so proud of. Moomintroll tries to tell her he never liked it really, but she is inconsolable.

Next morning they recover from all this excitement with breakfast and then split up to go swimming or sunbathing. The Snork finds a reef of gold inland, but the others find lots of wreck washed up by the sea – a life belt, a snow globe but most impressive of all is the big ship’s figurehead which the Snork maiden finds.

All the animals share their finds and the Snork maiden very graciously gives the big painted figurehead to Moomintroll. They pack all the discoveries onto a raft tied to the back of The Adventure and sail back towards the mainland. Moomintroll is in the middle of describing how beautiful the painted figurehead is when he becomes aware that the Snork maiden has gone quiet with unhappiness. Very sensitively, he then tells the maiden she is much more beautiful than any figurehead. He likes her much more. The Snork maiden blushes with pleasure.

A few weeks later it is boiling hot August. Moominmamma agrees to let the children go and set up a base in the seaside cave. They make themselves comfortable and Snufkin tells him stories he’s heard (from the Magpie) about the Hobgoblin, who collects rubies and rides about on a magic black panther.

But above all the Hobgoblin is consumed by a quest for the biggest ruby of all, the King of Rubies. He has travelled around the solar system looking for it on each of the planets. Currently he is searching the moon, and it is from there that his hat fell to earth and landed on the big mountain where Moomintroll, Sniff and Snufkin found it. All the creatures feel a thrill of fear and excitement go through them.

They wake next morning to find it is raining strong steady rain. Counter-intuitively they decide to go fishing. Meanwhile Moominmamma decides to tidy up Moominhouse. Among all the bric-a-brac she rolls up some of the Hemulen’s old botanical specimens and, without thinking, throws them into the hat in the corner – uh-oh – then goes for a well-earned nap.

The children have a fabulous adventure in the boat, and catch an enormous Mameluke fish which drags the small boat around like a whale until it eventually gives up the ghost. They sail it back to shore and then struggle to carry its huge carcass back to Moomin valley.

Where they discover that the whole house has become completely overgrown with vines and creepers and fruit trees which have all erupted from those botanical specimens which we saw Moominmamma throw into the hat. They have to hack their way into the cellar to gain entrance, while Moominpappa is breaking Moominmamma free from the bedroom where she’s been blocked in by thick vines and creepers.

Once this is all sorted out, the children have a wild afternoon playing Tarzan and Jane, swinging from the creepers hanging from the drawing room ceiling.

Outside the Hemulen gets bored of guarding the fish in the rain. When it eases off a bit he gets some matches and starts a fire, initially to keep warm but then decides to roast the fish. So the family ends all its jungle adventures just in time to come outside for an open air, fresh fish barbecue!

Next morning Thigumy and Bob arrive, two little creatures who speak their own language and have brought a heavy suitcase. They are taken in by Moominmamma, like all other creatures, fed milk and soon find a corner of the Moominhouse to live in. They tell the Moomins the suitcase really belongs to the Groke and she’ll probably come looking for it. Sure enough that night the air goes chill and the big sad Groke appears on their doorstep. After staring morosely, she slips away without saying a word. (When I was a boy it gave me some kind of frisson that so many of the key characters are female; I can’t define it exactly, but it added to the books’ exoticism, compared to lots of English children’s stories which were more often than not about boys.)

The Snork is very pompous and bureaucratic. He tries to organise a court to prosecute Thingummy and Bob for stealing the Groke’s suitcase. Thingumy and Bob blow cherry stones at him through their peashooters. All the characters are allotted roles like prosecuting lawyer and jury. It is all great fun.

Suddenly there is a chill over the forest, the sun goes behind a cloud, all the colour leeches out of things. The Groke has returned. But it’s not the suitcase she wants back, it’s the contents. Thingumy and Bob refuse. Moominmamma has a brainwave and goes and gets the Hobgoblin’s Hat: will the Groke accept the hat instead of the contents of the suitcase? To prove its magic they put a couple of cherries into the hat and – luckily for everyone – these turns into rubies. The Groke is impressed, takes the hat, disappears and is never heard from again.

In the final chapter it is the end of August ‘when owls hoot at night and flurries of bats swoop noiselessly over the garden’. Moomintroll is woken by Snufkin and they go down to the bridge they sat on at the start of the book. Snufkin announces the time has come to be on his way. He is a restless soul. And he sets off that very moment, walking into the distance playing his mouth organ.

Moomintroll wanders sadly back to the house where Thingumy and Bob try to cheer him up by taking him to the secret dell they’ve made in the bushes and revealing the contents of their suitcase. It is an enormous magical ruby which changes colour. Stunned, Moomintroll realises this must be the King of Rubies the Hobgoblin is seeking.

Back at the house disaster has struck – Moominmamma has lost her handbag. A Wanted advert is placed in the paper offering a reward for the finder – a Huge Party will be held in their honour. Word spreads. Soon every creature in Moomin Valley is searching for Moominmamma’s handbag. But it turns out that Thingumy and Bob had stolen it, because its pockets were just the right size for sleeping in. Since everyone has been so kind to them they reluctantly decide to go and fetch it from its hiding place and present it to a delighted Moominmamma.

The scene is set for a vast August Party, with loads of food and drink to which all the creatures of the valley are invited.

At the height of the party an excited Thingumy and Bob present a big surprise, by opening their suitcase and revealing the King’s Ruby which lights up the entire valley with its wonderful red glow. It is even visible from the mountains of the moon where the Hobgoblin is still searching. Quick as anything he leaps onto his magic panther and flies back to earth, arriving in the heart of the party.

There is a stand-off in which the Hobgoblin asks for the ruby but Thingumy and Bob steadfastly refuse. Oh well, the Hobgoblin is consoled with a delicious plum jam pancake and then declares that, since it’s a party, he will grant everyone’s wish. One by one the characters ask for wishes which the big sad Hobgoblin grants – for example Moomintroll wishes for the feast table they’re sat at to be sent to his distant friend Snufkin and immediately it levitates and flies off. Moominmamma, with a mother’s wisdom, wishes that Moomintroll should cease pining for his friend, and immediately his heart is freed from sorrow.

The Hobgoblin can make everyone happy except himself. Thingumy and Bob ponder this, go into a corner to confer and then – say that their wish is for the Hobgoblin to have a ruby as big and dazzling as the King’s Ruby – and lo and behold, the valley is filled with twice as much red light, as a ruby of equal splendour – the Queen’s Ruby – appears!

And so the Hobgoblin spends the rest of the night making everyone’s wishes come true and, as dawn rises over the happy valley, everyone goes home to bed.

The illustrations

At least half the pleasure of reading the Moomin books is the sheer visual pleasure of the illustrations. There’s a major one on almost every page.

The appeal stems from:

  • the essentially humorous, baby-like conception of the characters themselves
  • the clarity of line, the precision and deftness of the drawings
  • in the more complex ones, the wonderfully evocative effect of the cross-hatching and shading
  • the Heath Robinsonian intricacy of the more detailed illustrations (like Sniff at the telescope in Comet)
  • or the childlike simplicity of some of the smaller, incidental illustrations

The illustrations are themselves just part of the whole visual apparatus which surrounds the text. This includes a map of Moomin Valley as well as an introductory letter to young readers from Moominmamma and the numerous incidental small illustrations.

In addition there are chapter headings which give detailed summaries of each chapter’s events – and, at the top of every page, a few words summarising the events on that page (as a boy I used to love checking these summaries to see how closely they matched up with what actually happened on each page, and spotting mistakes).

Thus the books are packed with incidental information and decoration so that every aspect of the book’s production helps create an all-enveloping, fascinating and transporting environment.

Moomin facts

In this book we learn that:

  • Pine needles are the best thing to eat last thing before hibernating for the winter.
  • Snufkin’s best tune on the mouth organ is ‘All small beasts should have bows in their tails’.
  • Moomins can’t sing but they are excellent at whistling.
  • Hemulens all wear dresses (even the male ones). So when they’re being polite, male Hemulens curtsey.
  • All the bedrooms in Moomin house have rope ladders on the windows – quicker than using the stairs.
  • If the first butterfly of the year you see is yellow, it will be a lovely summer.
  • The Hattifatteners congregate every June on the Lonely Island before setting off on their endless quest for nobody knows what. Hattifatteners can’t speak or hear.

Nature

Moominhouse is the only house in the valley. These are extremely rural stories, as close to nature as can be: no other houses or people at all, let alone cars or trains or any element of the modern world. Instead, the Moomins live right by nature, immersed in its rhythms (hibernating and waking with the seasons). Many of the chapters start by indicating the month and then describing the kind of weather to be expected, the heat or coolness, the state of leaves in the trees, the noisiness or subduedness of the forest creatures.

And a really strong feature is the way the Moomin world is teeming with life. When they go for walks in the woods the trees are rustling with little forest creatures, the seaside is bristling with crabs and shellfish – nature is alive with voices and creatures and sprites and spooks and tree spirits combing their long black hair.

And all these weird and wonderful creatures talk and wish you the time of day as you stroll past, or join in silly games, or reveal wonderful mysteries. Everything is not exactly enchanted but open and free and calm and happy. Nature is open and available.

Moomintroll kept close behind Snufkin as they went through the wood. There were rustlings and patterings on both sided of the path and it was almost a bit frightening. Sometimes small, glittering eyes stared at them from behind the trees, and now and then something called to them from the ground or from the branches. (p.48)

Having recently visited the exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery about Tove Jansson I know that the lakes and seashore of Finland were extremely important to her, scene of many happy holidays with her family. The sea, in particular, is a recurrent subject, described very brilliantly in all its uncanny beauty. Here is the storm beginning to brew up on Lonely Island.

The sea had changed. It was dark green now with white-horses, and the rocks shone yellow with phosphorus. Rumbling solemnly the thunder-storm came up from the south. It spread its black sail over the sea; it spread over half the sky and the lightning flashed with an ominous gleam. (p.69)

And the characters’ response is the response of any adventurous 8- or 9-year-old.

‘It’s coming right over the island,’ thought Snufkin with a thrill of joy and excitement.

How wonderfully she captures the excitements and thrills of childhood.

Moominmamma

As usual Moominmamma is the unheralded heroine of the books, the calm accepting practical centre around which the world revolves, anchoring the tremendously safe, secure, happy and loving Moomin household, ‘a place where everyone did what they liked and seldom worried about tomorrow’ (p.16).

Strange new guests and even stranger events are all calmly welcomed, room made for them at the big table, while the steady routines of domestic life continue with Moominmamma calmly and sensibly making jam and pancakes.

Good things

This is linked to the way that everything that happens is exactly the kind of things which a child would want to happen. Climbing a mountain, finding treasure, owning a Magic Hat, sailing to an unknown island, weathering a Big Storm, finding washed up booty, night-long parties with dancing and fireworks – it is all the ingredients of a kind of perfect summer adventure holiday, of ideal childhood fantasies, all brought to life in vivid prose which has a strange dreamlike inconsequentiality.

And food, the yummy scrummy children’s food which Moominmamma is always preparing and serving. For example, the provisions they take to the cave, much of which is exotically non-English – betraying their Scandinavian origins – but recognisably yummy-sounding: raisin-pudding, pumpkin jam, bananas, marzipan pigs, sweet maize and pancakes. Always pancakes. Lots of pancakes.

Same with the amazing-sounding punch Moominpappa makes for the Big Party, out of almonds and raisins, lotus juice, ginger, sugar and nutmeg flowers, one or two lemons and a couple of pints of strawberry liqueur (p.140). Wow. Make mine a double.

Good prose

And the prose style is so wonderfully straightforward, good humoured, taking the most amazing events and ideas completely in its stride, plain and simple but capable of awesomely pregnant meanings and significances.

Outside the snow fell, thick and soft. It already covered the steps and hung heavily from the roofs and eaves. Soon Moominhouse would be nothing but a big, round snowball. The clocks stopped ticking one by one. Winter had come. (p.13)

Isn’t the rhythm marvellous, the diminuendo towards the last three-word sentence. And the subtle use of alliteration (hung heavily) and assonance (roofs and eaves). The simple use of baby language (‘big, round’). The brevity heavy with symbolism and meaning – ‘The clocks stopped ticking one by one.’

You know you are in safe hands.

Related links

The moomin books

1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November

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by Simon on November 17, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Childrens, Novel
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 17, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/17/finn-family-moomintroll-tove-jansson/

Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson (1946)

‘You must go on a long journey before you can really find out how wonderful home is.’
(Snufkin, page 93)

Inspired by the current exhibition about Tove Jansson at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, I am rereading the Moomin books. I’ve been meaning to for ages. I’m reading the old Puffin paperbacks my parents bought me back in the late 1960s when I was 8 or 9. Just handling them brings back memories, and immersing myself in the stories brings back a wonderful warm feeling of safety and adventure.

The plot

The Moomin family have settled into Moomin Valley after the great flood carried their house there. Moominpappa has built a little bridge over the river and Moominmamma is making jam. Moomintroll and his friend Sniff go exploring, make friends with the silk-monkey, then discover a wonderful cave by the sea, and Moomintroll goes diving for pearls. But everywhere they go secret signs have been laid out – carved in trees, marked in the sand, laid out in pearls – the sign of a circle with a flaring tail.

One dark and stormy night a bedraggled visitor knocks at the door. It is the muskrat who is welcomed in and made at home by Moompappa. The muskrat is a philosopher who lies around in a hammock all day contemplating the pointlessness of everything.

The muskrat tells Moomintroll and Sniff that a great comet is coming. To find out more they must go to the observatory high in the Lonely Mountains. So Moominmamma packs their bags and makes sandwiches and off they go on a raft down the river. They avoid an attack of crocodiles by throwing them a pair of Moomintroll’s woollen trousers (that’s the way to handle crocodiles). On a bare barren strand they hear the beguiling sound of a mouth organ and steer to the shore where they meet and befriend Snufkin, a wanderer over the land.

He takes them up into some hills. In a ravine they see garnets twinkling. Sniff loves jewels and clambers down to collect them but he is terrified by a large dragon and only just manages to scramble back up to safety!

Snufkin joins their expedition. Floating along on the raft, he tells them about the time a volcanic vent opened up right next to where he was sleeping and erupted a torrent of fire spirits. One of the weaker ones fell into a nearby stream and wailed for help so Snufkin scooped him out, though he got a bit burned in the process. The grateful fire spirit gave Snufkin a bottle of underground sun-oil.

He’s barely finished this story before the raft goes over a tumultuous waterfall and then into a long black tunnel which gets narrower and narrower.

Just as the river (and the raft) are about to plunge down a black hole, it gets jammed by the mast and, looking up through an opening in the tunnel roof, Moomintroll, Sniff and Snufkin are able to attract the attention of a Hemulen who is collecting butterflies up above. He is most surprised to pull up three little animals in his butterfly net. Hemulens are big and rather slow. They love collecting things.

The trio climb up into the mountains and are attacked by a massive eagle. But when the eagle misses the three little creatures cowering against the rockface, it goes off in a huff. Eagles are very proud creatures, you know. Up in the misty mountains they come across a gold ankle bracelet which Moomintroll retrieves from a ledge.

Then they come to the observatory on the Lonely Mountains and quiz the professors about the comet. The professors are irritated to be bothered and interrupted. They also say the Moomin group isn’t the first to do so; they recently had a visit from a Snork maiden who mainly fussed about a lost bracelet. Sniff manages to get one of the professors to talk, who tells him that the comet will collide with the earth on the seventh of October at 8.42pm. Possibly four seconds later.

Well, there’s only one way to cope with the end of the world:

‘Then we must hurry home as fast as we can,’ said Moomintroll anxiously. ‘If only we can get home to mamma before it comes nothing can happen. She will know what to do.’ (p.76)

So they hurry home. When Snufkin explains the game of rolling boulders over mountain cliffs, Moomintroll accidentally falls over the cliff, too, and is only saved because they are all roped together. Moomintroll is becoming obsessed with rescuing the Snork maiden whose ankle bracelet he found.

They discover the Hemulen at the bottom of the mountain with a bump on his head from falling stones. They don’t tell him it was they who are responsible.

Then they hear screams and run to the rescue of the Snork and his sister, the Snork maiden, who is being attacked by a Snork-eating bush. Moomintroll fights the bush, rescues the Snork maiden and gives her back her ankle bracelet, at which she goes a fetching shade of pink and asks Moomintroll to go and collect blue flowers for her; they’ll set off her colour adorably. (She is rather a preening, beauty-obsessed young person.)

The Snork maiden makes a lovely fruit soup with some berries and the last of Sniff’s lemonade, and they all go to sleep in the forest on a mat she has woven under the baleful red glow of the comet which is looming larger and larger in the sky.

Next day they come across a little village store in the woods, where they buy more lemonade and the Snork buys an exercise book to write down what to do if a comet hits the earth. Moomintroll buys the Snork maiden a beautiful pocket glass. That evening there is a party in the forest, where Snufkin plays his mouth organ accompanied by a giant grasshopper on a fiddle. Tree-spirits and water-spooks come out and all the little forest creatures dance till the early hours and everyone falls asleep.

Next morning Moomintroll and Sniff, Snufkin, the Snork and the Snork maiden come to the sea and discover it has completely dried up, leaving a vast muddy basin littered with seaweed. So they find planks and poles and saplings and make stilts for themselves and stilt-walk across the abandoned sea bottom. They come to a ruined old hulk of a ship which contains treasure but also a huge octopus which tries to attack Moomintroll till the Snork maiden uses the pocket glass to shine light in its eyes and make it slope away in fear.

They come across some enormous sea shells, the biggest of which is singing softly to itself the age-old song of the sea.

‘Oh!’ sighed the Snork maiden. ‘I should like to live in that shell. I want to go inside and see who is whispering in there.’
‘It’s only the sea,’ said Moomintroll. ‘Every wave that dies on the beach sings a little song to the shell. But you mustn’t go inside because it’s a labyrinth and you may never come out again.’ (p.122)

Next day they climb back up out of the sea basin to dry land and approach Moomin Valley. Everyone is fleeing the comet, the paths are full of little forest folk pushing wheelbarrows full of belongings. They come across a very disgruntled Hemulen whose stamp collecting has been upset by all the bother. (He is a cousin on his father’s side of the butterfly-collecting Hemulen they left in the Lonely Mountains.)

They come across a fleet of Egyptian grasshoppers who are eating everything in their path. And then a tornado which originated in Egypt and has turned into a devastating wind comes blowing through Moomin valley. They persuade the Hemulen to take off his dress (Hemulens always wear dresses), all grab hold to the frills of the hem and are blown high into the sky, coming to rest in a tall plum tree.

Next day they finally arrive home at Moomin House to find Moonmamma putting the finishing touches to a lovely birthday cake for Moomintroll, with pale yellow lemon peel and slices of crystallised pear. Moominmamma rushes out to meet them and her son introduces her to all the newcomers, including the bashful Snork maiden. The Muskrat has already told Moominmamma that the comet is due to crash right in Moomin valley, which is very vexing because she has only just weeded the vegetable patch.

Now they tell Moominmamma and Moominpappa about Sniff’s cave and everyone decides it will be the best place to hide from the comet. They all run round gathering provisions to see them through. They hurry off to the cave with a wheelbarrow of belongings and also the house bath (of course) which they squeeze through the doorway and put Moomintroll’s cake into for safekeeping. At the last minute the Muskrat shows up, and withdraws into the shadows. After a few minutes they realise he has sat on the cake. Oh dear.

‘My cake too,’ groaned Moomintroll. ‘In my honour!’
‘Now I shall be sticky for the rest of my life I suppose,’ said the Muskrat bitterly. ‘I only hope I can bear it like a man and a philosopher.’ (p.149)

At the last last minute Moomintroll realises they’ve forgotten the silk-monkey and goes rushing back out into the woods to find her, managing to track her down and rushing with her back to the cave. Barely has he thrown himself through the curtain they’ve hung up over the entrance than there is a tremendous whooshing sound and the comet flies right through the valley, out the other side and flies clear of planet earth. A tiny bit closer and, well, none of us would be here to read this. But it all turned out OK. Phew.

Moominmamma reassures the terrified little creatures and tells them to cuddle up against her while she sings them a lullaby.

Snuggle up close, and shut your eyes tight,
And sleep without dreaming the whole of the night.
The comet is gone, and your mother is near
To keep you from harm till the morning is here. (p.155)

The next morning the sky is blue again – no longer the horrible red caused by the comet – and the sea is flooding back into its bed, gleaming like soft blue silk. All the little creatures of sea and land are coming out and frolicking and singing. Snufkin wakes up and starts playing his mouth organ. Moomintroll digs up the pearls he buried in the cave right at the start of the story and gives them to the Snork maiden.

But the last and biggest pearl he gives to his beloved Moominmamma.

The illustrations

Half the pleasure of a good children’s book is the illustrations, but in this case more than half. What is it about Jansson’s line drawings which are so airy, fantastical and yet so utterly charming? The preciseness of the line drawing (as opposed to the fuzzy style of, say, Edward Ardizzone). The vivid three-D effect of the cross-hatching and shading. Maybe the key is the essentially humorous, baby-like conception of the characters themselves, which have survived translation into film and animation and models and puppet form. Sometimes it’s the Heath Robinsonian intricacy of the more detailed illustrations (like Sniff at the telescope). Other times the big simplicity of awe-inspiring images, like the comet coming close.

The worldview

Jansson doodled the first Moomin characters into existence during the war. It is no coincidence that in these early books the Moomins represent stability, love and optimism in the face of great disasters (a flood, a comet rushing towards the earth).

What comes over for me, in the books, is their groundedness in the enormous sense of safety and security created by the Moomins’ loving parents. Whatever happens, the little ones – Moomintroll and Sniff – know they can be home in time for plum jam and tea. Nothing can ever be seriously wrong as long as Moominmamma is darning socks and decorating cakes. Moominmamma will know what to do.

Because Moominmamma is the central character. Moominpappa is a rather remote character, an eccentric handyman who builds bridges and fixes things, but is mostly in his study, puffing his pipe and writing memoirs about his adventures. It is Moominmamma the little ones go running to, who accepts all their adventures calmly, who packs bags full of practical items they’ll need on their journey (a frying pan, an umbrella) who never panics, who is calm and capable.

It is this wonderful warmth and all-accepting calmness of Moominmamma which sits at the centre of Moominworld, carrying on the quietest of domestic activities – arranging shells around the flower beds, making plum jam, arranging lemon peel on a cake – and in doing so, creating, securing and safeing a whole world.

In the kitchen Moominmamma found Moomintroll and Sniff curled up together in a corner, tired out by their adventures. She spread a blanket over them and sat down by the window to darn Moominpappa’s socks. (p.21)

Good things

Everything that happens is exactly the kind of thing which a child would want to happen. The book features a kind of greatest hits of childhood fantasies. Just to take the first 30 pages, Moomintroll and Sniff find a secret path in the woods, have an adventure with a new friend (the silk-monkey), discover a cave – and not just any old cave, but the perfect ideal cave, with rocky walls and a sandy floor – Moomintroll goes diving for pearls (and finds lots), they set off down a river on an adventure on a raft, fight crocodiles and fry pancakes on a camp fire amid the roots of an ancient tree. Wow. It’s like the best holiday ever.

It’s not just that some of these things are exciting: pretty much every single one of these events is a devout fantasy wish of any adventurous 6, 7 or 8 year old.

Good prose

And the style is so straightforward, so warm and good humoured, taking the most amazing events and ideas completely in its stride.

On the very top of the jagged peak above them stood the Observatory. Inside, scientists made thousands of remarkable observations, smoked thousands of cigarettes, and live alone among the stars. (p.71)

As with everything in the books, the child reader thinks ‘How wonderful!’ To be a grown up and smoke cigarettes and be a fascinating professor and live lonely and remote among the stars. God, what a dream!

Related links

The moomin books

1945 The Moomins and the Great Flood
1946 Comet in Moominland
1948 Finn Family Moomintroll
1950 The Exploits of Moominpappa
1954 Moominsummer Madness
1957 Moominland Midwinter
1962 Tales from Moominvalley
1965 Moominpappa at Sea
1970 Moominvalley in November

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by Simon on November 16, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 16, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/comet-in-moominland-tove-jansson/