A family man is having a mid-life crisis, his own personal crisis of masculinity. His life is one of comfort, safety and regularity and it feels too easy. He wants to grapple with nature, he wants to feel that he’s protecting and providing for his family. So he persuades his wife that they should leave their comfortable home and move to a remote island to live in a lighthouse: the man, his wife, his son -a gentle, sensitive boy, on the cusp of adolescence- and his physically very small but extremely tough foster-daughter.
The wife is a gentle, calm, nurturing woman, who, without complaint, sets aside her own preferences in order to help her husband get through whatever he feels he has to get through. But she pays a price for her selfnessless. Life is tough on the island, she gets lonely, she misses the things she loves back home, and, for all her overwhelming need to care for others, she can’t completely bury her resentment at being taken for granted, as if her own wishes were of no account. (To add to her sense of being confined, her husband is so determined to be a provider and protector, that he’s constantly telling her to take it easy and leave everything to him.) She occupies herself by making a garden that the sea promptly sweeps away, and then by painting from memory, on the inner walls of the lighthouse, a picture of her beloved garden at home.
Unknown to any of the family, they’re followed to the island by someone who has become obsessed with them. She is a desperately isolated figure, so appallingly alone that it’s frightening just to be in her presence. Her loneliness freezes everything around her. (Such people do exist – I’ve met them myself).
There is another extremely isolated figure, the island’s single existing inhabitant, who they just call the Fisherman, because he won’t tell them his name. He lives in a tiny hut and refuses to talk to anyone.
It doesn’t sound like a children’s story, but the title of this book is Moominpappa at Sea, by Tove Jansson. The father, his wife and his son are not human, but Moomins, which (as you probably know) are cute, hippo-like, cartoony creatures. The tough girl is a tiny fierce-faced creature called Little My, and the lonely being that follows them is a creature known as the Groke, who freezes the world around her not just in a metaphorical way, but quite literally. If she sits somewhere for too long the ground turns to ice, and everything that grows there dies.
I came to this book accidentally. I’ve been suffering with insomnia lately, and I’ve found it helpful to listen to audio books to get me back to sleep. For this purpose, the book needs to be enjoyable to listen to but completely undemanding, and so familiar that I don’t feel any need to stay awake to find out what happens next. Favourites from childhood work well for this, and I started with Through the Looking Glass. There’s a wonderfully eccentric Audible version read by the SF writer, Harlan Ellison.
I loved the Moomin books as a child, so I thought I’d try the same trick with Moominland Midwinter, but this turned out to be a slightly different proposition. Looking Glass is charming, witty and completely untroubling, but Midwinter, while it is also charming, deals with things like loneliness and abandonment, not so much as to be disturbing perhaps but enough to get me interested in the same kind of way as I get interested in an adult novel. In fact I became so interested that I went on to acquire Moominpappa at Sea, which I never read as a child.
Tove Jansson’s Moomin books evolved over time from the blissful, adventure-filled escapism of the earlier books like Finn Family Moomintroll (when I was a child, my copy of this fell apart from being read and re-read so often), into works that one could imagine turning into adult novels, like Jansson’s own The True Deceiver, simply by changing imaginary creatures into humans, and inventing realist alternatives for the various magical events.
Moominland Midwinter represents the transition point between the genuine children’s books, and the adult books in childish clothing. I enjoyed its magic as a child – Moomins usually hibernate, but Moomintroll wakes in the middle of winter to find a whole new cast of characters living out their lives around his home while his family sleeps- but, as an adult, I was too interested in its themes to be able to use it purely as soothing aural wallpaper – or not, at least, until I’d listened to it properly right through.
Moominpappa at Sea, though, I think children would find dull, and I remember casting it aside in disappointment when I tried it as a child myself. There’s not enough adventure, not enough delight, too much of the disillusionment and compromise of adulthood, and, like an adult literary novel, it’s driven not by plot, wonder and exciting events, but by interactions between characters, psychological development and the play of different approaches to the question of how to live a life.
Without trying to describe the whole book, here’s one example. Moomintroll (the son) is very sensitive, Little My is worldly and much more astute, and she thinks he’s way too prone to feel sorry for everyone. On one occasion, Moomintroll discovers a little hidden glade in a wood, which he decides to make into his own private hiding place, only to discover it’s full of biting red ants. He agonises over this. The ants were there first, after all, and he and his families are interlopers. Yet he loves this spot, and wouldn’t the ants be equally happy elsewhere?
Moomintroll asks My if she can think of a way of moving them. She can. She kills the ants with paraffin. Moomintroll is appalled, and tries to atone for the slaughter by sprinkling sugar in the wood for ants to eat. But My is unrepentent. She tells him that actually he wanted her to do exactly what she did, he just didn’t want to know about it. And indeed, once the smell of paraffin has faded, he starts to enjoy his little glade.
How should we weight our own needs as against the needs of others? What is the middle ground between complete selfishness (ugly) and complete selflessness (masochistic). It’s a question that suffuses not only this book but other Jansson books too -Katri in The True Deceiver, as I recall, takes a similar position to Little My – and one that Jansson doesn’t answer. My and Moomintroll’s approaches are both shown to be effective in their own way. My’s toughness helps bring the Fisherman out of his isolation and return him to his role as lighthouse keeper, but Moomintroll’s empathy warms the Groke.
What particularly interested me was the contrast between the two parents. Both want to support the family, but Moominpappa wants to do this in heroic mode- taking them across the ocean, building things for them with his bare hands, bringing home food for them from the sea- while Moominmamma, like many real mothers, does so in a quiet, domestic way that almost goes unnoticed. (One of my daughters pointed out to me that, even when husband and wife share out the family tasks equally, it’s typically the mother who takes on the unglamorous and invisible job of remembering things.) Everyone expects Moominmamma to be at home when they return there. No one but her realises that this expectation is itself an enormous burden.
Moominpappa’s way is egotistical – he wants to be admired for what he does – and it is stereotypically masculine. Moominmamma’s is self-effacing and stereotypically feminine. Neither is judged by the narrator, and while we might nowadays be more quick to recognise how Moominmamma is oppressed by her domestic role, it seems to me that Moominpappa is also in his own way trapped by the idea of masculinity.
(I remember as a child feeling so daunted by those expectations that there were moments I wished I’d been born a girl. But probably this was because I didn’t even notice the invisible burden women bear.)
Moomintroll himself, in the course of the story, looks after people, or aspires to do so, in both these different ways. At one point he becomes preoccupied by some ‘sea horses’ he sees playing along the shore (think cute, feminine ponies that live in the sea, rather than curly-tailed fishes) and builds an elaborate fantasy around one of them and how he is going to heroically rescue her from some terrible danger – the ‘heroic’, egotistical conception of what it means to look after someone. He gives up on this notion when the horses themselves laugh at it.
When it comes to the Groke, Moomintroll has no such fantasies. He becomes aware that she has followed the family to the island. He knows this cold dark being is drawn to light and warmth, and that she will sooner or later approach the lighthouse in search of these things. He wants to protect his parents from having to deal with this, so he begins going down to the beach every night with a paraffin lamp for the Groke to look at. This isn’t ‘heroic’, because the whole point is that it shouldn’t even be noticed.
And when Moomintroll begins to feel sorry for the Groke as well as protective towards his family, his motive appears to be genuine empathy, rather than a desire to be admired. Eventually the paraffin runs out, but Moomintroll doesn’t want the Groke to feel abandoned so he goes down to the beach empty-handed anyway. The Groke is touched by this – she has never experienced anything like it. She even performs a kind of dance, and, for the first time in the whole series, the ground she’s been sitting on isn’t frozen.
Okay it’s simplistic. Truly frozen people aren’t that easy to unfreeze. But I found the contrast between the ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ way of relating to others (my terminology not Jansson’s), genuinely thought-provoking in the same kind of way that I’d expect from an adult novel.
And, like an adult novel, it’s ambiguous. The things that strike me aren’t necessarily what would strike another reader, or what the author herself was mainly interested in. I think Jansson herself identifies with Moominpappa’s need to grapple with, and make his peace with, nature, much more than she does with Moominmamma. (She herself was never a mother, and chose to go and live on a remote island every summer for many years, with just her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä).
Given that it isn’t really a children’s book, why did Tove Jansson choose to tell this story using cute cartoon creatures, rather than realistic human beings? The result does feel a little clumsy, a round peg forced into a square hole. But then again, when you have a globally recognised cast of characters, and readers who love them but are growing up, why not make use of them?
A real sea, a cartoon character – Jansson’s own illustration.
