Fair Play

Michael Hayward

Children of all ages love Tove Jansson’s Moominfamily sto­ries, which take place in an imag­i­nary set­ting — Moominvalley—
peo­pled by char­ac­ters who are com­pletely believ­able despite their uncon­ven­tional appear­ance and idio­syn­cratic names (the Snork Maiden, Moomintroll, Snufkin, Little My). The Moomin books have remained in print for more than fifty years; there is even a Finnish “Moomin World” theme park for the series’ many faith­ful fans. But few Moomin read­ers know that Jansson also wrote eleven books for adults, sev­eral of which are avail­able from Sort Of Books. One, The Summer Book, is an old favourite of mine brought back into print; set on an iso­lated island off the coast of Finland, it tells of an inde­pen­dent young girl who bonds with her soli­tary and acer­bic grand­mother; A Winter Book offers a selec­tion of twenty shorter sto­ries, most of them pre­vi­ously unavail­able in English. But the real find is Fair Play, a brief novel by Jansson avail­able for the first time in an English trans­la­tion by Thomas Teale. To quote from the orig­i­nal cover copy, Fair Play is about “two women who share a life of work, delight and con­ster­na­tion,” a rela­tion­ship that is mod­elled on the real-life part­ner­ship of Jansson and her com­pan­ion, the Finnish graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä. What stands out here, as in all of Jansson’s writ­ing, is the respect shown by each char­ac­ter for the other’s need to be inde­pen­dent. Fair Play is a lovely lit­tle book in which noth­ing truly dra­matic hap­pens, apart from the daily adven­tures of shared lives made richer through a com­bi­na­tion of cre­ative work and love.