LABORA ET AMARE. WORK AND love: the motto Tove Jansson worked into her personal bookplate design in the 1940s when she was a young artist. Fifty years later, famous as one of the world’s most enduringly imaginative and inspiring writers and illustrators, she felt much the same. As she told an interviewer in 1994: “The most important thing for me has been work. And then love.”

The publication of Fair Play in its first English translation is a cause for celebration. It’s the first of Jansson’s novels for adults to be translated into English for more than 30 years. Jansson published Rent Spel (its Swedish title) in 1989, when she was in her mid-seventies (she died in 2001, aged 86). It was the ninth of 11 books for adults, of which, until now, only three have reached full English publication.

Jansson has always been rightly fêted for being a brilliant children’s author. Her tales of the Finn Family Moomintroll made her internationally famous. But her fiction for adults shares the clarity, beneficence, imagination and survivalist calm that made her writing for children unique.

On the backs of the Penguin Puffin copies of the Moomin tales, her biography said that she lived and worked alone on an island; actually she lived, both on her island and in Helsinki, alongside her lifelong partner and travelling companion, the graphic artist Tuulikki Pietilä. The women spent more than 40 years together, working and travelling.

“We always took our sketch books with us wherever we went,” Pietilä wrote, in a beautiful piece called Travels with Tove, where she remembers how on one trip Jansson jumped, full of typical enthusiasm, into the Atlantic in January for a bathe; how they liked to avoid stuffy first-class and would always sneak off to second-class, where things were more fun; how they shared a lot of unlikely adventures, once ending up bunking in a kind of youth hostel in Edinburgh even though they were quite old ladies by then – “but we looked young”, as she says – and how they always made sure that they had enough money for cigarettes and film for Pietilä’s Konica camera. “Tove was always my best subject.”

So what can happen when Tove Jansson turns her attention to her own favourite subjects, love and work, in the form of this novel about two women, lifelong partners and friends? At first sight it looks autobiographical. Like everything Jansson wrote, it’s much more than it seems.

Is it a novel? Is it stories? It’s both; it breaks the boundaries of both forms in a series of linked vignettes about two women who live and work side by side. “They lived at opposite ends of a large apartment building.” Mari is a writer and illustrator. Jonna is a film-maker and artist. Once again, not much seems to happen. Mari and Jonna work a lot, watch films together, make films together, spend time on an island, travel the world, relive their youth, argue about parents, go sailing, get caught in fog.

Their stories intertwine. They know each other’s sleeping habits, living and working habits. They honour these habits. They know that things are often uncontrollable, even on the tiniest island. They fight. They get jealous. When this happens, they sort it out. The aesthetic and creative urge compels them always. They put off work. They get irascible. They refuse each other and irritate each other, and are kind and tough with each other, so that both love and work are revealed as made of the little refusals and agreements that happen mundanely in the course of a shared life.

It’s a novel with a profound sense of discretion at its core. But the flip side of silence is voice, and the flip side of nothing much happening, as always with Jansson, is that absolutely everything is happening. Take the first page of the first, typically unassuming story, Changing Pictures, where Jonna rearranges the art on one of the walls of Mari’s apartment. This novel is about creativity from the very start. It is very much about how to shake off old ways of seeing, how to see things differently, get rid of what’s “hopelessly conventional” and replace it with something more hopeful. It is also a story full of the unselfish admiration of another, from the word go. Jonna is blithely uncompromising (as Mari will be in other chapters), and in her art, or in her editing of Mari’s living space, she makes something come alive with “a completely new significance . . . almost provocative”.

So many of the vignettes are about how to bring art and life together into a working relationship. And so much of it is about these concepts held in its new title, fairness and playfulness. The “blend of perfectionism and nonchalance” that Mari sees in Jonna is apparent all through Jansson’s own writing style – perfectly caught by Thomas Teal, a luminous translator of Jansson’s twin talent for surface and depth, simplicity and reverberation in language, and someone who knows exactly how to convey her gift for sensing the meaning embedded in the most mundane act.

But it is, too, a piece of writing about time running out, about the end of living space, about inevitable ends. Part of its analysis of art knows that art makes a killing in the same way as a pin will through a butterfly. Part of its radicalism comes from the repeated admittance that its main characters are simply getting older.

Yet the form of the book suggests that there’ll be no stopping. There’s only the journey, the open travelling companionship, the long-running aesthetic argument and agreement between Jonna and Mari, “doing all right”, from the start to the finish.

Jansson deals with its relationship with care, humour and, above all, affectionate discretion. Fair Play is, in the end, a huge, yet astoundingly discreet, declaration of a good working love, a homage to the kind of coupledom that rarely receives such homage, and at the same time a homage to the everyday weather, the light, the skies, the countless bad movies and good movies of living and working well with someone for the length of an adult life.

Labora et amare.“They sat opposite each other at the table without talking.” It’s a relationship that works. Its final chapter reveals not just the size and truth of the love but the revolutionary freedom that comes with such love. Fair Play is a very fine art.

This is an edited extract from Ali Smith’s introduction to Fair Play

FAIR PLAY by Tove Jansson

Sort of Books, £6.99; 152pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £6.64 (free p&p)

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