You're no worse than anything else when one gets to know you.

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Tove Jansson, MOOMINLAND MIDWINTER (1957; translated by Thomas Warburton, 1958).

When I was nine years old, I had already begun to read adult fiction by Wells, Poe, Clarke, Simak, and even (although I failed to understand him at the time) J. G. Ballard. Still, when a friend of the family lent us copies of Tove Jansson's COMET IN MOOMINLAND and FINN FAMILY MOOMINTROLL, I fell in love with the books. In my late 'teens, I read them again, but even though I had bought copies of her later books, I was never able to work up an interest in reading them, because the new characters were unfamiliar to me; they were not the creatures I had loved from the early books.

This quality of seeming foreign, this idea of being separated from people and circumstances loved in the past, is very much a part of the book I read yesterday, MOOMINLAND MIDWINTER. I have no idea what the book might have said to me at the age of nine, but it spoke to me with surprising relevance at the age of fifty-five.

The characters at the heart of the previous books, the Moomins, have always hibernated during winter, but this year Moomintroll, the son (the protagonist of the other stories), wakes up and finds himself unable to sleep in a world utterly alien to his experience. Everything familiar has been altered by cold and by snow; the landscapes, and even his own house, have been infiltrated by secretive creatures ("the lonely and the rum, the wild and the quiet") who have winter purposes of their own. One of these creatures, the angry and elusive Dweller Under The Sink, has a language of his own that no one else can understand; another, a bizarre "ancestor" of the Moomin species, has no language at all, and is apparently deaf and blind to any of Moomintroll's efforts to bond with him.

As a result of these alien circumstances, Moomintroll spends much of the book in lonely despair. While the one person he knew in summer who is also wide awake in the cold, Little My, thrives in the snow and takes every opportunity to experiment with winter sports, Moomintroll longs for summer light and summer heat, for bathing in the sea and talking to the people he loves. Even when he tries to learn about the new, mysterious creatures around him, he can only catch glimpses of their furtive activities.

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 One of these beings, an adult named Too-ticky, does treat him with kindness, but even her generosity of spirit is touched by winter: she remains a foreigner in Moominland, a friend yet at the same time Other:

Too-ticky looked at him with her calm blue eyes. Still, he wasn't quite sure that she really did see him. She was looking into her own private winter world that had followed its own strange rules year after year, while he had lain sleeping in the warm Moominhouse.

She does her best to share this private winter world with the clearly-grieving Moomintroll, but her terms are not his:

"What song is that?" asked Moomintroll.

"It's a song of myself," someone answered from the pit. "A song of Too-ticky, who built a snow-lantern, but the refrain is about wholly other things."

"I see," Moomintroll said and seated himself in the snow.

"No, you don't," replied Too-ticky genially and rose up enough to show her red-and-white sweater. "Because the refrain is about the things one can't understand. I'm thinking about the aurora borealis. You can't tell if it really does exist or if it just looks like existing. All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured."

Moomintroll wants the certainty of summer light, but nothing in this nocturnal world makes any sense to him. Everything shifts in the cold, and meanings are hard to determine. When he confesses that he does not understand snow, Too-ticky replies:

"I don't either.... You believe it's cold, but if you build yourself a snowhouse it's warm. You think it's white, but at times it looks pink, and another time it's blue. It can be softer than anything, and then again harder than stone. Nothing is certain."

There is one certainty: the winter can kill. A creature freezes to death. Soon refugees from the cold arrive, to seek food and shelter. Moomintroll allows them to stay in the house of his family. Unlike Little My, who revels on the snow and ice with no concern for people, Moomintroll wants to help the strangers, but at the same time, he wants to protect his helplessly-sleeping family and their home; this conflict adds to the weight of his despair.

Only near the end of the book does life change for the better, when he witnesses, for the first time, the wonder of actual falling snow:

"Oh, it's like this," thought Moomintroll. "I believed it simply formed on the ground somehow."

Caught in a terrible blizzard, he learns to overcome his fear by allowing himself to be taken by the wind and the snow:

"Frighten me if you can," he thought happily. "I'm wise to you now. You're no worse than anything else when one gets to know you. Now you won't be able to pull my leg any more."

In the previous books, in his will to adventure and his bravery, Moomintroll was very much the son of his father; here, in his compassion, in his concern for home and family, in his willingess to endure with patience, he becomes the son of his mother. This gives a haunting poignancy to his reunion with her in the spring time:

Moominmamma scooped up a handful of snow and made a snowball. She threw it clumsily, as mothers do, and it plopped to the ground not very far away.

"I'm no good at that," said Moominmamma with a laugh. "Even Sorry-oo would have made a better throw."

"Mother, I love you terribly," said Moomintroll.

Despair and loneliness have not crippled him; instead, he now sees possibilities in life that had never occured to him in his younger days:

The Snork Maiden had come across the first brave nose-tip of a crocus. It was pushing through the warm spot under the south window, but wasn't even green yet.

"Let's put a glass over it," said the Snork Maiden. "It'll be better off in the night if there's a frost."

"No, don't do that," said Moomintroll. "Let it fight it out. I believe it's going to do still better if things aren't so easy."

Suddenly he felt so happy that he had to be alone.

I wish I had read this book as a child; perhaps, being on the verge of adolescence and wary of the changes in store, I might have understood it. Still, nothing was lost in reading it now: stuck as I am in a mid-life crisis and struggling to find a way through a landscape both empty and threatening, I needed this book, and I can share my gratitude.