Tove Jansson, 1914-2001.

TOVE JANSSON, who died recently in Finland, was probably one of the most successful and loved authors of the twentieth century. Though she is published as a children s writer, her books have millions of adult readers. In her own country the characters she created--the Moomin Trolls and the other odd things that share the Finnish forests with them--are a national institution, but Moomin fanatics are found all over the world.

Tove Jansson had a life almost as odd and extraordinary as some of her characters and there seems to have been a good deal of Moomin in her. Born in Helsinki in 1914, she was the child of a sculptor and a cartoonist. In her autobiographical A Sculptor's Daughter she tells of a childhood that achieved a Moomin-like balance between bourgeois security and bohemian adventure. She began having drawings published at the age of fourteen, and her two prodigious talents of illustration and writing would later combine perfectly in the Moomin stories. She travelled widely in Europe before the Second World War, studying theatre and design. She drew cartoons for the newspaper Garm in the 1940s, where a character resembling Moomintroll first began to appear publicly. During the 1940s and 1950s she executed a number of important artistic commissions, including the frescos on the basement walls of Helsinki's City Hall, church altarpieces, a mural for the Town Hall at Hamina and paintings for the Union Bank of Finland.

The first Moomin story was published in 1945 under the title The Little Trolls and the Great Flood. She appears to have wanted to create in the Moomintrolls' world a haven of happiness and security after the horrors of the Second World War, when Finland was attacked by the Red Army and barely preserved its national survival after a long and heroic fight. Moomin Valley was always the secure centre of the family's life, to which they returned after adventures, catastrophes and partings.

Her books had, at last count, been translated into thirty-four languages and have sold millions of copies worldwide, though the first story still does not have an English translation. This is an amazing achievement for an author writing in a small and remote country in an obscure language (she wrote largely in Swedish--not quite as obscure as Finnish). The appearance of most of the Moomin books in English in Puffin books, in a series of what seem excellent translations, is part of Puffin's late editor Kaye Webb's huge gift to Anglophone culture.

Very few children's (or adult) authors have matched Tove Jansson's wit and ceaseless inventiveness and very few have been rewarded by such success. The Moomins have appeared in opera, film, radio and television, lately in a fifty-two-installment Japanese television series. In Finland and other Nordic countries the Moomins appear on stamps, bottle-tops, Finnair aircraft, and countless other products. In the mid-1980s a Moomin Museum was opened in Tampere in Finland. Numbers of visitors to it completely eclipse Tampere's other main tourist attraction--the last Lenin museum in the world.

Usually crazes for cute childhood characters last a couple of years and fade away. The Moomins keep going, because, I think, like the characters created by Arthur Ransome, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and a few other masters, they were not intended as commercial gimmicks or created by marketing committees, but are parts of a luminous and coherent world and of stories that have the depth and richness of real art.

The organisation Friends of the Moomins was founded in 1991. It has several thousand members and publishes a magazine. It brought out a CD of Moomin songs for Tore Jansson's eightieth birthday, and performs Moomin plays. There is a plethora of Moomin internet sites. In this, as in some other ways, the Moomin books resemble the idyllic childhood adventure tales of Arthur Ransome, which the internet demonstrates are loved all over the world (Ransome, like Tove Jansson, has a very big following in Japan). While Nordic readers seem to centre their interest on the domestic Moomin family, the Japanese prefer the odd loners like Sniff, Too-Ticky, the Hattifatteners, and best of all the philosophical Snufkin. I was introduced to the Moomins in 1968, long before they were so famous, by the poet and children's writer Lee Knowles, who also enriched my life by introducing me to the works of Rosemary Sutcliff.

Tove Jansson was regarded a national treasure in Finland and received many awards, including the Hans Christian Andersen Award and the Finlandia Medal. In 1994 she received the Great Prize of the Swedish Academy. This is the body that also awards most of the Nobel Prizes, but the Great Prize-established by King Gustav III in 1786--is considered an even rarer honour, as it is awarded only infrequently for great achievement in one of the areas within the Academy's mandates.

Jansson never married, and spent much of each year, particularly in summer, with her mother and sister alone on remote Klovharun Island in the Gulf of Finland, an hour and a half by rowing-boat (the only communication) from the next island, a life which is evoked in Moominpappa at Sea and a quite different, non-Moomin novel, The Summer Book. There are eight Moomin books in English, but Tove Jansson wrote about thirty books altogether, Moomin and non-Moomin, as well as drawing a Moomin comic from 1953 to 1959, which her brother later carried on.

THE MOOMIN WORLD is full of odd distortions of reality sufficient to create a feeling of otherness but not so great as to make what happens there simply unreal. One is not surprised to find a Fillyjonk (a nervous, spinster-like creature which looks something like a red setter) washing her carpet in the sea. Moominmamma stores gold at the bottom of a pond to admire its lustre through the brown water. As well as mystic woods, the Moomin world has fairs, circuses, theatres, observatories, lighthouses, storms, floods, volcanoes and comets. A theatre which floats away in a flood is guarded by a faithful if grumpy old theatre rat who has a completely authentic disdain for the civilians outside the profession.

The Moomins are very much a traditional family, somewhat extended. Moominpappa, despite occasional fits of wandering and restlessness, has with the years and the acquisition of responsibilities become a solid troll and paterfamilias, who in the evening writes the memoirs of his wild youth with a special memoir-pen, and is well aware of the special pleasures of reading one's own book aloud to a captive audience. Moominmamma is a homemaker, providing not only for her immediate family but also for all manner of blow-ins like Toffle, Thingummy and Bob, Sorry-oo, Misabel and the Snork Maiden.

There are also, however, lonely wanderers and individualists, like Snufkin and Too-Ticky who come and go in Moomin Valley, pursuing their own lives and quietly subverting conventional behaviour. Too-Ticky, who lives in boat-houses and fishes in caverns under the ice in winter, is a sort of bag-lady gone right. The Hattifatteners are little electric spook-like things, who worship a barometer and who, Moominpappa discovers, have a terrible secret. The Groke is a cold, ghastly creature, the essence of death, decay and envy, that kills the ground it sits on.

There are also Hemulens, things evidently of more or less the same generic species of troll as Moomins, but much less attractive. They look something like Moomins, but you can recognise the differences in their faces straight away and differences in their characters as well: some are compulsive bureaucrats and regulators, supplying the jailers, park-keepers and doubtless the traffic wardens of the Moomin world; others are loud and hearty Hooray Henrys, organisers of Life Be In It programs, demanding everyone have a good time on their terms, and, given the chance, destroying any possibility of silence and contemplation. Many of them tend to be compulsive collectors and hobbyists. Plainly drawn from human characters Tove Jansson had encountered, Hemulens are not evilly-intentioned, but even the best of them seem at odds with the poetry of life.

An underlying theme of the Moomin tales is the wonder and positive joy of the world. Tove Jansson got in a number of hits at the philosophies of nihilism; a philosophical muskrat whose favourite book is called The Uselessness of Everything is plainly not to be admired. Though the philosophical messages are delivered gently, it is a great mistake to see Tove Jansson's creations as merely whimsical. Even the jacket-blurb of Moominpappa at Sea suggests an underlying seriousness: "Moominpappa's feeling unnecessary and old. It's time to do something new and exciting. A lighthouse is waiting for him on a tiny rocky island ..."

The Secret of the Hattifatteners is quite a frightening little tale of loneliness and negativity. Loneliness is also a theme of the two strange and interlocked late volumes, Moominpappa at Sea, and the final story, Moominvalley in November, published in 1971.

The later stories increased in complexity and psychological depth, and some of the characters, like Mymble and Little My, grew from jokes into fully-rounded figures,

It would be unjust and off-putting to call Moominpappa at Sea Kafkaesque, but there is perhaps something about it that suggests a brighter, more positive Kafka. Tove Jansson was only fifty-six when Moominvalley in November was published, but she evidently decided this strange, haunting, autumnal book would be the last Moomin tale. However, she continued writing till the end of her life. Did the by-then complex Moomins grow into something else? We await the translation of the complete Tove Jansson canon and wonder why it has not happened already.

The huge success around the world of Tove Jansson's sunny, delightful, and sometimes profound stories is one of a number of answers to the bleak nastiness and nihilism of much modern and allegedly realistic children's writing of the contemporary Carnegie Medal sort and to What often seems a zeitgeist of despair. Few writers have left so happy a legacy.