There’s a line in The Summer Book by Tove Jansson where the narrator describes the fragility of moss. Residents of the tiny Finnish island where the novel is set are careful to avoid treading on the plant, and it is “only farmers and summer guests” who walk on it.
This is because (“and it cannot be repeated too often”) moss is “terribly frail”. “Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies.”
This kind of deep respect for nature is characteristic of Jansson’s writing, from the Moomin books, which focus on a family of trolls who live in harmony with their surroundings, to The Summer Book and the nine other novels and short-story collections she wrote for adults.
The Summer Book, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, now has a sizeable British fanbase, largely thanks to the independent press Sort Of Books reissuing the title in 2003. It’s not hard to see why it is so loved: the novel is, as the author Ali Smith wrote at the time of its reissue, “a masterpiece of microcosm, a perfection of the small, quiet read”.
It also feels, as we navigate the climate crisis and generational culture wars, highly relevant. The slim volume tells the story of a grandmother and granddaughter exploring, arguing and playing together during a summer on the island. As Smith puts it: “It would be easy to be sentimental here. Jansson never is.” Instead, she uses this intergenerational relationship to highlight the importance of respect: for one another, for differing opinions and for the planet. It’s a notably open-minded book, which is perhaps reflective of the open-minded life that Jansson and her family lived.
Sophia Jansson, the late author’s niece and the inspiration for the granddaughter character in the novel, tells me over Zoom that she never realised her family wasn’t “normal” growing up (“whatever normal is”). The Janssons were adventurers, discovering the uninhabited islands on which they would go on to spend every summer and campaigning in Sweden for girls to be allowed to camp outdoors. Following the death of her mother when she was six, Sophia’s “core family” was made up of her father, her grandmother, her aunt Tove, and Tove’s partner, the artist Tuulikki Pietilä.
In The Summer Book, a friend from the mainland, nicknamed Berenice, comes to visit the fictional Sophia. Berenice, described as “too well bred and terribly quiet”, is scared to join in with grandmother and Sophia’s usual adventures, and quickly goes from being the object of Sophia’s admiration to a frustrating burden.
“Tove’s poking fun, in a sense, at what people might think is normality,” Sophia says now. The island, for the characters and the real-life family, was a place to create a new kind of “normality”, away from the conventions of the mainland. This was particularly true for Tove herself, who could live freely as an artist and a queer person on the island.
Within the family, Sophia says, “there was just an unexplained but self-evident tolerance for whomever”. As a child, she was never explicitly told about the nature of Tove and Tuulikki’s relationship – homosexuality would still have been classified as an illness in Finland at the time – but she could see that they loved one another, and that the other members of her family accepted them.
Sophia has “no understanding for people who have these very harsh opinions about who they choose to live with”. This echoes the sentiment of The Summer Book’s grandmother, who, after an argument with her grandchild about the existence of the devil, firmly tells her young relative: “You can believe what you like, but you must learn to be tolerant.”
When Sophia steps on moss now, she still thinks of The Summer Book’s warning, telling herself “OK, you can step on it once, maybe even twice, but the third time is really bad”. This attitude of care and preservation is at the heart of The Summer Book: it proposes that every plant, every insect – and, indeed, every person – has a right to exist and to be looked after. And, 50 years on, that message is more vital than ever.
The 50th anniversary edition of The Summer Book, which includes an afterword by Sophia Jansson, is published by Sort Of Books (£9.99). Sophia will be talking about the book in a virtual event at 7pm on 1 September hosted by Bookshop.org.
