Moominvalley in November

Tove Jansson (Puffin, 1971)

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

Preface

It is the end of November. Summer is over; Autumn is drawing to a dim close. Six unlikely characters find themselves drawn to Moominvalley, home to the friendly Moomin family. But the Moomins are not there¹. So timid Toft, bossy Hemulen, anxious Fillyjonk, ancient Grandpa-Grumble, self-contained Mymble and solitary wanderer Snufkin have to try to make their own family in the deserted Moomin House. Not entirely successfully.

Like the characters in the book, you know the Moomins. Even if you don’t know the Moomins, you know the Moomins. They first started appearing in the corners of creator Tove Jansson’s art before the war, got their first book of their own in 1945, then started appearing in comics from 1947. Both the books and comics achieved international success, but since Jansson’s death they have become truly ubiquitous. Jansson’s niece, Sophia Jansson-Zambra, has created a global licensing empire, introducing Tove’s characters to the world. On my desk right now is a Snufkin coffee cup from the Moomin shop in Covent Garden next to a stuffed Hattifattener I bought from a Moomin cafe in Tokyo.

A great deal of the success of the Moomins as a licensing vehicle is down to Jansson’s artwork. She illustrated her books herself. She was an artist, a very good one, but she was a superlative illustrator. Her pen and ink illustrations for the books are some of the very best. They are deceptively simple, made of clear, fluid lines that are nonetheless delicate and expressive. In a few, quick marks, she is able to create a world that is clearly delineated but remains open to interpretation and investigation.

She is able to summon character and mood from the tiniest gestures and is especially good on light and shade and on the use of the negative space of the blank page. This is particularly true of the Moomin family themselves: Moominmamma, Moominpappa and their son Moomintroll, soft little hippo creatures who, being entirely white, exist mostly as empty space on the paper, ready to be inhabited by the reader’s imagination.

This also helps make them graphically distinctive and an excellent source for branding. But if you only know the Moomins from the branded plates and purses and plush toys, then there’s a lot you don’t know about them.

Because the books themselves are deceptively simple too. The earlier books appear to be gentle, childish adventures, but they are always shot through with a defiant weirdness and a tinge of Scandinavian melancholy. Snufkin, for example, the character on my coffee cup, is an inveterate rebel and loner who, every autumn, abandons his best friend Moomintroll without so much as a goodbye, heading off into the deep woods to enjoy the silence (and pull down any admonitory signs he finds). My soft toy with its little felt hands is one of the Hattifatteners, creepy little ghost creatures that travel in whispering hordes, following electrical storms. Nothing is quite as cute as it seems.

By the time we get to Moominvalley in November, the last of the Moomin books, things have become increasingly dark. Most of the characters are lost and looking for something. The Fillyjonk is paralysed by anxiety and germophobia and looks to Moominmamma as an example of a perfect housewife. The Hemulen bosses people around to cover his own inadequacy, and sees Moominpappa as an ideal of self-contained masculinity. Snufkin is looking for a tune; Grandpa-Grumble, a friend; Toft, a mother. Only the Mymble seems untroubled in her perfect self-satisfaction.

All of them are looking for answers in the Moomins and none of them find them, because they don’t find the Moomins. The family has gone away and so these mismatched strangers are thrown together, trying to deal with each other’s problems when they can barely handle their own.

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Contents

All of these characters are, of course, Moomin fans. Just like the reader, they have heard stories of how wonderful the Moomins are and have come to find them, only for Jansson to disappoint them. She has sent the Moomins on holiday from their own book.

One of the characters, Toft, is an awkward loner. His instinctive response to finding himself shut in a house with strangers is to hide himself away with a book. This was always my tactic as a child and I inevitably identified with Toft. But I suspect Jansson also identified with him.

The book Toft has found is a scientific textbook about the evolution of Nummulites, a form of marine protozoa. Like many children, Toft is reading beyond his comprehension and misunderstands the book as fiction. He begins to imaginatively invest in the story of the Nummulite, identifying with its development in a hostile and changing environment.

Eventually he imagines it so intensely that it comes to monstrous life, lurking down the dark end of the garden, grinding its teeth. In fact, it becomes so vivid that Toft becomes afraid of it, overwhelmed by its presence. In the end he has to imagine it away, making it diminish back into the small idea it once was.

Is this what Jansson is doing with this book? Do Toft and his Nummulite represent Tove and her Moomins? Is this Jansson looking at the growing popularity of the Moomins and starting to feel them getting away from her? This is, after all, the last of the Moomin books, happening entirely in their absence, deliberately distanced from them.

At the very least, there is the sense that that image of the happy Moomin family is deceptive. Theirs is not the perfect family that most of the characters imagine it to be. That place where the Nummulite is hiding is the miserable bit of the garden where Moominpappa and Moominmamma go when they’re cross. Toft is resistant to the idea that Moominmamma is ever cross, but this is because he is idealising her, because he has no mother of his own and desperately wants one.

And this is probably the key resonance between Jansson and Toft. Jansson’s own mother died while she was writing the book; she too no longer had a mother. The book is full of loss and yearning, not just for the missing characters but for what they represent to those who remain, the sense of definition and place that the idea of them offers.

All of the characters have lost a sense of family and therefore central parts of their sense of themselves. Even Mymble is missing her sister, the incorrigible Little My, who lives with the Moomins. Their experience of Moominvalley in November is of trying to recreate that family, trying to create their own identities within it.

But the book is also frighteningly clear-eyed on what those families are really like, even the Moomins. Jansson seems intent on reminding Moomin fans, both fictional and real, that the image of the ideal family that you might get from the stories is not the reality.

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Afterword

Tove Jansson’s undermining of her own fantasy world extends beyond the Moomins. Like many other children’s books, the creatures of the Moomin’s worlds are racially stereotyped. Just as all of Tolkien’s orcs are evil and all of the elves are good, or all of Kenneth Grahame’s mustelids are thugs, except badgers, so the personalities of Jansson’s characters are determined by what kind of creature they are.

Hemulens are always loud and bossy, Fillyjonks uptight and prissy, Toffles are small and Whompses are chaotic. Indeed these characteristics run so deep when it comes to the inhabitants of Moominvalley that their species and name are inextricable: all Hemulens are called ‘Hemulen’, all Fillyjonks, ‘Fillyjonk’.

These are recognisable types, of course; we all know a few bumptious Hemulens and fusspot Fillyjonks, and this kind of stereotyping is something that we all do. It’s certainly something that all families do: so-and-so is the clever one, so-and-so the cook, she’s the pretty one, he’s the black sheep. At each get-together we’re pushed back into our roles, falling back into the family dynamic even as we chafe against it.

The characters of Moominvalley in November certainly chafe. None of them are happy with their assigned roles. Part of the genius of this book – of all the Moomin books – is how they operate as empathy engines, how they insist on us understanding all of the characters as distinct people. Unlike the orcs or weasels who teem anonymously in the backgrounds of their books, Jansson wants us to know what makes the Hemulen tick, and why the Fillyjonk is how she is.

And also how they might change. By the end of their stay in Moominvalley in November, most of the visitors have learnt something. They have learnt about each other, glimpsing the inner turmoil that they might otherwise have never suspected, and learnt something about themselves. And they discover that, like the Nummulite, they can develop and grow too.

The Moomins never quite return, but the characters discover not just that their ideas about them were wrong-headed but also that they might do without them altogether. By the end it feels that although Jansson might be trying to usher us all out of Moominvalley, she’s only doing so for our own good and is trying to equip us for life in the real world, without the presence of the perfect Moominmamma.

But the book doesn’t end on an entirely mournful note. The name of the book in Swedish is Sent i november, ‘Late in November’. At the very end, Toft, the last of the characters left in the valley, sees the light on the mast of Moominpappa’s boat approaching from across the sea and runs down to the jetty to be there when they return. Right at the end of November.

The Moomins, in other words, will be home for Christmas, as all families should be.

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Puffin published a lot of children’s books in translation, not just the Moomins, but also less well known books like Nils-Olof Franzén’s Agaton Sax mysteries

1. Acknowledgements to friend-of-the-Metropolitan Lucy Thomas for the ‘Godot for kids’ analogy