Fair insights into Tove

FictionLove and work are the themes of this gentle narrative consisting of scenes from a life as experienced through a friendship. Not quite a novel and not quite a collection of stories, either, this final work by the Finnish writer best known as the creator of the Moomin stories, is an interconnecting sequence of predominately domestic episodes.

Written in the third person, Fair Play acts as a kind of tracking camera, carefully filming the interaction between two women who live, work and travel together. Rent Spel was published in 1989 when Jansson, a writer and illustrator who was by then 75, was long-established as a national institution.

For readers of her other books, it may come as a surprise to discover that Jansson - who was always presented on her book jackets as living alone on an island - had a different life. She spent a great deal of her time on her island, but she also lived in Helsinki. Most importantly, she had a lifelong companion, graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä. For more than 40 years the pair lived, worked and travelled together. Jansson had been the only child of a famous illustrator mother and a sculptor father, and the imaginative energy she acquired as a child never deserted her. She appears to have been a highly practical and dynamic Peter Pan up until her death in 2001 at the age of 86.

Last year saw the publication of A Winter Book: Selected Stories, a rich, seductive and appealing volume that gathered together some 20 pieces, which flow rather beautifully between the contrasting landscapes of impressionable youth and vulnerable old age. A few are slight enough, yet the inclusion of her masterpiece, The Squirrel, in which an elderly woman living alone on an island discovers she is sharing her home, makes the book essential reading. There is nothing sentimental about this, and it is one of those rare stories capable of making a reader feel at one with the writer.

Also included in A Winter Book is another strong, atmospheric story, this time from youth. The Boat and Me records the day the narrator undertakes a daring voyage, one her mother finds out about and encourages with sandwiches and support. For the girl it is an all-important test. Her father eventually arrives on the scene and takes over. He even eats the sandwiches.

In 2003, Sort of Books began its timely celebration of Jansson's adult work with the publication of an English edition of The Summer Book, which was first published in 1972. In it an old woman and a young girl live on a tiny island off the coast of Finland in the course of one summer. It is a straightforward narrative, but it could also be interpreted as a self-exploration, as Jansson in old age recalls her younger self.

THIS NEW TRANSLATION, Fair Play, a series of interconnecting quasi-memoir sequences, is probably most valuable for its autobiographical insights, its candour, and its detached, business-like tone. "They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building near the harbour, and between their studios lay the attic, an impersonal no-man's land of tall corridors with locked plank doors on either side. Mari liked wandering across the attic; it drew a necessary, neutral interval between their domains."

Jonna emerges as the bossier personality. She lives by her routine, which includes taping foreign films - this has resulted in a large, indexed collection, carefully filed for repeat viewings for which there is never time. Jonna believes in the old classic films, and describes her joy on seeing many of them when she was a student: "You understand, I was possessed. I was happy. And now when I see them again, these classics, so awkwardly expressive, with the clumsy technology that was all they had, it's like being young again." Mari remarks, albeit innocently, "But you never grew up." Jonna favours what she sees as "pure movies": "Westerns, Robin Hood films, wild pirate romances and a lot of other simple stories of justice, courage and chivalry."

The pair spar verbally; Jonna is testy and mercurial, while Mari is more easy-going. In one of the stronger pieces, One Time in June, the past comes back in the form of a woman who was once little Helga, a frightened child, "and afraid of practically everything". Mari's mother had helped establish the Girl Scouts in Sweden. Helga was never going to be Girl Scout material, particularly with her fear of thunderstorms, but Mari's mother "would find the unfortunate child and try to calm with whatever explanations she could come up with - sudden temperature changes, electrical charges, updraughts and downdraughts. It is not certain that Helga understood but it did make her feel better."

Well, after a lifetime, Helga returns, bringing with her a scrapbook, a meticulous record of the life and times of Mari's late mother. Helga's record suggests an obsessive voyeurism, that proves unsettling to her now elderly daughter. Ironically, a thunderstorm intervenes and saves the couple from Helga.

In another story, the two are overtaken by a heavy fog while out in Jonna's boat. Mari asks Jonna if she has any crispbread on board. Jonna's reply is an exasperated "I know, I know. Your mother always had crispbread with her when she went out to sea. But the fact is, I don't have any crispbread in the stern box." "Why are you angry?" Mari asks. "I'm not angry. Why would I be angry?"

When the two old ladies arrive in Phoenix, Arizona, they certainly get noticed. It is a good piece bristling with Jansson's singular energy. Although Fair Play does not offer the store of riches gathered together in A Winter Book, it is a book for her admirers, particularly as it fills in many of the spaces. A newcomer interested in exploring Jansson's later work should, however, first look to either The Summer Book or A Winter Book before taking up this most recent addition to her work in translation.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Fair Play By Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal Sort Of Books, 123pp. £6.99