Literary Stockholm, part 5: Mio My Son

Read the background for this blog series.
Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

If I were to decide, I would choose Karlsson-on-the-Roof as featuring Stockholm in the works of Astrid Lindgren. It takes place wholly in Vasastan where Astrid Lindgren also lived for many years. But whoever decided, chose Mio My Son, that is my favourite, so I won't complain, but it can be questioned whether Stockholm setting is integral to it when most of the story takes place in Faraway Land. Unless of course we adhere to the interpretation that Bosse (for whatever reason, Andy in English) never travels to Faraway Land, but sits on a bench in Tegnérlunden in central Stockholm, imagining the wonderful and dangerous adventures in a parallel world. This is the most plausible interpretation, but a sophisticated one, and without doing any research I would guess that most young readers and many adult readers, if asked where the story takes place, would say, Faraway Land. Because we so much want the unhappy orphan Bosse to find a father and friends. Yet does the character-narrator really believe it himself? He has to shout – represented by italics – that he is in Faraway Land and not sitting on a bench in Tegnérlunden.

I have written extensively about Mio My Son and taught it both in Sweden and in the US. Narrative situation and narrative perspective are the aspects that fascinate me, and the novel, published in 1954, is a very early example of first-person narration in fantasy. Writing in 1992, John Stephens claimed that first-person perspective was impossible in fantasy, but of course since then we have seen tons of examples of the opposite. Yet believe me, as someone who wrote her PhD on twentieth-century fantasy, it was unusual until 1990s, so Mio was indeed a daring text.

I re-read Mio as recently as two years ago for a conference in Cambridge about horses in children's literature. Horses are prominent in Astrid Lindgren's work, and I tried to explore Mio's horse not as his dæmon or Patronus, which can of course be done, but as an artistic device to represent the protagonist's emotional states in a more detached way. Writing this paper, I was looking exclusively at horsey moments so I probably didn't read the whole novel as carefully as I did now. I pretty much know it by heart, although there were a couple of details I hadn't remembered; but I did have strong memory of the narrator going back to his life in Stockholm, so maybe the choice of this book to represent Stockholm is not inadequate after all.

I was struck once again by the beauty of language, the rhythmic flow of prose with a folktale flavour to it.

My own Swedish copy is in storage so I borrowed the book from a library. I don't like these luxury editions of Astrid Lindgren with red cloth quarter bindings because I find them distracting. Otherwise it is exactly the same, with wonderful original illustrations by Ilon Wikland.

I enjoyed re-reading Mio even though I remembered it so well. This book is like a poem that you can read again and again.

The sign is of course in Tegnérlunden, and I sat on the bench I think was the right one. But I had no golden apple and found no genie in a beer bottle.