Jennie’s Review: The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson
Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver is a chilling book. It is not a thriller in the typical sense of that word. There is no breathless chase with certain death waiting at the finish. There are few weapons, none of them made of steel. Still, there is a mounting sense of dread, a stretching of the nerves, and an eerie sense of silence that pervades the entire book.
The story centres around two women, Katri Klings and Anna Aemelin. Katri only has one person she cares about in her life, her brother Matt, and is uncompromising in her efforts to make his life better. She is cold, clear, and honest. Her honesty is neither generous nor malicious; it simply is. She prides herself on this objective way of looking at the world:
But you never know, you can never really be sure, never completely certain that you haven’t tried to ingratiate yourself in some hateful way–flattery, empty adjectives, the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want; maybe an advantage, or not even that, mostly just because it’s the way it’s done, being agreeable as possible and getting off the hook….No, I don’t think I made myself especially agreeable. I lost this opportunity. But at least I played an honourable game.
The game that Katri is playing is a deep one–her goal is to ingratiate herself and her brother into the life of Anna Aemelin, a wealthy illustrator who lives alone on the edge of the village. Katri slowly becomes an integral part of Anna’s life, someone that she inadvertently and uncomfortably begins to depend on, someone who seems to be the only person on Anna’s side, who appears to be the only person Anna can trust. And Anna seems such an easy target, vague and soft. But the game that Katri plays quickly gets complicated, and it soon becomes apparent that Anna has power of her own:
Anna Aemelin made people see. They saw and recalled the essence of the forest, and, for a moment, experienced a vague yearning that felt pleasant and hopeful.
This ability, this talent for painting the smallest detail and making others feel it and wish for it, may seem weak and feeble when thrown up next to Katri’s determination that her brother should have a better life, but Anna’s ability to see and make others see continually pushes back at Katri’s plans and rocks the sense of righteousness that Katri feels about her plans for Anna, Matt, and herself.The story unfolds slowly throughout the dark and the cold of the Swedish winter. Jansson’s descriptions are spare and lyrical, and the novel deserves the label of thriller not because of some sort of car chase or violent scene but because Jansson slowly and deliberately ratches up the tension to breaking point and then holds it there with grace and aplomb. This is not a novel that is easy to put down; it traces the shattering of the world around the main characters in a way that echoes the cracking of the ice on the lake around the town. It is difficult to trace the track of the game that Katri Klings is playing with Anna Aemelin’s life. It is even more difficult to decide who has won, and who, or what, has been lost.
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