The Summer Book by Tove Jansson

Take a book in which there is no plot but bucketloads of positive feelings presented simply, and it will become a cult. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Jonathan Livingston Seagull were both bestsellers; no one could say what either was really about, but everyone could quote a meaningful truism from them. The Summer Book is in this mould: it manages to make you feel good as well as wise, without having to make too much effort.

Take a book in which there is no plot but bucketloads of positive feelings presented simply, and it will become a cult. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Jonathan Livingston Seagull were both bestsellers; no one could say what either was really about, but everyone could quote a meaningful truism from them. The Summer Book is in this mould: it manages to make you feel good as well as wise, without having to make too much effort.

It has already achieved modern classic status in Scandinavia, where it has constantly been in print for more than 30 years. In this country, the Swedish Tove Jansson is best known for her Moomin children's books; this is adult fiction that reads like a memoir.

It is a no-frills story: an old woman spends the summers on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland with her six-year-old granddaughter. They wander around, pick flowers, watch storms, take an occasional trip in a rowing boat to a neighbouring island, talk about and to the cat, and turn over stones. But under every stone they turn, there's an observation far deeper than the island's shallow soil (as Jansson herself might write.)

"Sometimes people never saw things clearly until it was too late and they no longer had the strength to start again," announces the elderly sage, who does seem to struggle with her tenses. Coming across a notice ("NO TRESPASSING") on a nearby island, the grandmother informs her grandchild: "No well-bred person goes ashore on someone else's island when there's no one home. But if they put up a sign, then you do it anyway, because it's a slap in the face." And when she proclaims: "Only farmers and summer guests walk on the moss ... The second time it doesn't rise back up. And the third time you step on moss, it dies," you know she's delivering a lesson on life. Even I found myself turning to my diary to jot down a couple of the wise old woman's sayings.

This book is in danger of taking itself rather too seriously; there is a lot of home-spun philosophy but only rare flashes of humour, which nevertheless are very funny. But what makes The Summer Book rise above the realm of happy thoughts for grim times are the observations on being young and growing old: the girl's desperation not to appear frightened of deep water, her grandmother's determination not to let her see that she knew she was.

Jansson is also a better writer than this sort of book deserves. Her minute descriptions of an "evil" leaf splattered by raindrops or the stroke of wind through the grass is some of the best writing on landscape I have ever read. I wish she had tackled something meatier, so I could enjoy her wry eye without having to dodge the slappings of sentimentality. The Summer Book says so much that we want to hear in such an accessible form, without ever really saying anything at all.