That said, the Moomin series’ beginning is not entirely auspicious. We know these people, even if we’ve never met anything that looks like them. Such creations as Snufkin, Little My, and the Groke are each, in their own way, fascinating: archetypal, enduring, deceptively three-dimensional. Ultimately, I think a large part of the books’ appeal lies in Jansson’s talent for clear, crisp character delineation. It’s tempting to describe it as a riff on Carroll’s Wonderland, differently populated and played by new rules less constrained by logic-games-though this too would miss the point. Alternatively, it may be because the avowedly Scandinavian Moomin world has a freshness and originality that owes very little to antecedents in English-language literature: the closest parallel would be, I suspect, with Grahame’s riverbank or Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, although Moominvalley is a long way from either of these. In part, this might be because Jansson’s multi-faceted approach to her creation-she was not only the author, but also the illustrator of the Moomin books-afforded her a kind of visual shorthand through which we experience her Moomin world, in pictures as well as in words. To my mind, no other author of speculative fiction-not Tolkien, Le Guin, Peake, Bujold, or Banks, however compelling their imagined worlds may be-has succeeded in matching Jansson’s achievement. The Moomin world is recognisable as our own, just wholly different its characters at once mundane, commonplace, and larger-than-life. Tove Jansson’s Moomin books have a sense of solidity, a certain impossible inevitability to them, that’s quite unlike anything else I’ve read. (Yes, they’re classified as children’s books. These are books that definitely merit re-reading. I’ll endeavour not to be too spoilerific, but I suspect the books are almost spoiler-impervious: knowing what happens next is no real impediment to enjoyment of the stories. I’m re-reading the Moomin books, because it’s been a few years since I last dipped into them and this time around, I’m reviewing them, one a week.
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