Finland is so routinely referred to as “the world’s happiest country”, it’s easy to forget that the accolade dates back only to 2012. Tim Bird, a long-time British expat living in Helsinki (who took out Finnish citizenship during the writing of this book) uses it as a convenient hook for this rambling if amiable memoir that breaks occasionally into a sociological treatise.
The Finns Bird interviews are rather bemused by the reputation for happiness though they acknowledge that much in their society does contribute to it: a generous welfare state, a high level of education, an intimate year-round relationship with nature, and, perhaps most crucially, the Finnish institution that is the sauna. It is deeply ironic that a people viewed by their Nordic neighbours as being dour and taciturn appear to have cracked the code of happiness.
Bird makes no claim of offering an authoritative portrait of the Finns (by his own admission, he does not read a lot of Finnish and his spoken command of the language is merely competent), but, as a magazine journalist and photographer by trade, he has a keen sense of what trends and characteristics to highlight. It’s not entirely uncomplimentary to say the book does read like an extended feature article. This has its pros and cons – for all the winning lightness of Bird’s narrative, you also feel he is at times burying the lede, such as in his assessment of Finnish history. The two wars fought with the Soviet Union between 1939 and 1944, which resulted in Finland losing tracts of three eastern provinces, including its second city Viipuri, and which probably contributed to the nation’s cult of resilience, known as sisu, and its postwar self-reliance, are not mentioned till about halfway through.
This is but one example of the sometimes frustrating structure of Happy Land, where themes are briefly visited and then returned to much later. There is also probably too much space devoted to the musings of previous foreign visitors to Finland, particularly the late-Victorian author Ethel Brilliana Tweedie, whose opinion on what was then evidently a very different country is repeatedly canvassed. These quibbles aside, it’s hard not to like Bird’s fair and objective appraisal of a highly likable country, with its endearing love of death metal, ice hockey, rally driving, and, of course, saunas.
