Moomintroll

Tove Jansson

Otago Daily Times, June 3rd 2019

How does one define the best book in the world? Let me count the ways: It is the first I remember reading and the last. The one I have forced on the most people and the one least frequently returned. It is the one I reread most often and the one that I dare not re-open lest it lose its original magic. The book I have just finished and the one that I am about to start. Asking me to choose is like asking me which daughter I love most, so I guess the answer is obvious. The best book(s) in the world are those I bought my nascent firstborn the moment I fell pregnant: Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll series.

These stories, more than any others I have read, encapsulate everything most magical about childhood. For a start, there is the cuteness factor of the Moomins themselves; there is not a child alive who could resist the company of a living, breathing, soft toy, and it is little wonder that these small, fluffy, hippopotami creatures are as popular in Japan as in their native Finland. But it is the world that Jansson has created that makes these books so particularly special. This is a place where eggshells thrown into a Hobgoblin’s hat re-emerge as clouds and books as words made animate. Where adults are not, as in so many children’s books, permanently AWOL, but absent when desired and there when needed. Where Moomintroll and his friends can embark on their adventures armed with sandwiches, lemonade, and their parent’s blessing, safe in the knowledge that home is just around the corner whenever they want it most.

This is no fairy-tale paradise, however, but a place where the sunshine is tinged with autumnal melancholy and the solitude of twilight, a world that piques children’s curiosity and satisfies their desire to be frightened without being frightful. Even the most fearsome of monsters, the icy Groke, is driven by the desire for warmth and companionship rather than malice. The natural dangers the characters face – comets, floods and storms at sea – are opportunities for adventure as much as sources of peril, and there is no crisis that Moominmamma cannot resolve with the contents of her handbag.

“Ah!” I hear you say. “I spy gender stereotyping”. Well, yes, perhaps you do, but as a mother, I like that Moominpappa potters in his workshop and procrastinates about writing his memoirs whilst his wife does the heavy lifting. And your condemnation overlooks such details as the cross-dressing Hemulen, Snufkin’s determined bachelorhood, and the multitude of other beings whose gender and orientation are decidedly ambiguous – as indeed you are meant to, for none of this matters. In fact, one of the most delightful features of the books is their celebration of diversity. Everyone is welcome in Moominhouse, from the Ancestor that lives under the stove to the numerous waifs and strays that find their way to the kitchen table and into the family.

Like all good children’s stories, the Moomintroll books also contain much for the forcibly-coerced adult reader to enjoy, from the nihilist Muskrat philosopher who is first into the metaphorical lifeboat when danger threatens to the mysterious Hattifattiners who resemble nothing so much as a herd of inflated condoms with arms. Not to mention Mrs Fillyjonk, whose lifelong sense of existential dread evaporates when a tornado sweeps away her picture-perfect home. What woman, I ask, has not secretly dreamed of such freedom?

They are also a marvellous repository of inspirational sayings – just Google ‘Moomintroll quotes’ if you don’t believe me – and, even more delightfully, you can use your familiarity with a relatively obscure Finnish author’s work as intellectual virtue-signalling. How I love exclaiming incredulously, “You haven’t read Moomintroll???” when asked why my second daughter’s middle name is My (although the literary gods have punished my hubris by invoking nominative determinism; she is every bit as mischievous as her diminutive namesake). But get in quick because a new English TV adaptation has just been released, rendering this particular perk time-limited. And if your children are of the book-hating variety, there are Moomin comics with which to tempt them and a plenitude of tie-in merchandise to boot.

Still not convinced that the Moomintroll books are the best in the world? Then read them yourself and rediscover the mysterious and wonderful world of childhood where new discoveries await at every turn, and there is nothing that can’t be solved by a tummy full of pancakes and a Hygge. If this doesn’t change your mind, then, in the immortal words of the Muskrat, “I have every respect for your deductions, but you are wrong, completely and absolutely, without any doubt.”

https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/best-book-world-part-2