Imagination needs roots

Each author finds their characters in observation, memory and those deliciously unexpected encounters. I don’t believe in imagination that exists in a vacuum, with no link to lived moments.

One such character

One such character, drawn from my own experience, appears in Handful — The Boy at the End of the Rainbow: the famous singer Metsätähti. She is the voice of Finland — crisp, gentle, like a dewdrop in the morning sun. She is inspired by Katri-Helena, who ended her career in August this year in Helsinki, before tens of thousands at the Olympic Stadium. She has been described as a blue and white voice of Finland (like the Finnish flag of blue cross on the white background).

I wasn’t in Helsinki to celebrate a career that began in 1963, when she recorded her first hit, Poikine Kuvat (‘The Photos of the Boys’), and, the same year, her breakthrough, Puhelinlangat Laulaa (‘Telephone Lines Sing’). But I did have an unexpected encounter with Katri-Helena.

A summer night, 1964

My father was one of the ushers at the local farmers’ summer pavilion on dance-club nights; my mother served coffee, sausages and cinnamon rolls to hungry youths and the gossipy ladies. While the men visited — ‘secretly’ — the back of a log pile for a nip of Koskenkorva (Finland’s answer to vodka), offered from bloke to bloke, the band set up their gear and the ladies adjusted their make-up for the first dance.

The farmers’ pavilion managed to book popular Finnish stars every summer, drawing audiences of all ages. Those summer-night dances came most often on Saturdays, after a good sauna and a few beers.

The tiny bird in the kitchen

There she was: Katri-Helena – a teeange star, in the back of the pavilions’ kitchen, waiting for the band to be ready, sipping lemonade, looking tiny, with all the ladies buzzing around her. This young star — a small bird among the busty farmers’ wives — looked at me as I tried to hide behind my mother. I was eight, so small someone had told my mother I looked like a mouse.

She smiled and asked if I wanted to sit on her lap for a while. I certainly did. She came from a world I knew was bigger, brighter and more colourful than our small rural village. She smelled wonderful. I sat there for about five minutes before my father came to say the band was ready. Then she was gone, and I inhaled the last of her perfume as if it were a ticket to a new world.

A wave and an air-kiss

I sneaked from the kitchen into the dance hall and, being so small, zigzagged my way unnoticed to the edge of the platform. I was mesmerised. The icing on the cake was the wave and air-kiss Katri-Helena sent when she spotted me at the corner of the stage.

The voice of a nation

Ever since that day, Katri-Helena’s songs have been part of every Finn’s life. It ceased to be about taste or preference; somehow, she caught the zeitgeist of a country newly recovered from war, reaching out to the world and beginning to prosper. With urbanisation — people moving from villages to cities — came loneliness and nostalgia that she captured, magically, in her voice. Katri-Helena became a synonym for the Finnish melancholy and resilience we call sisu.

Watching the farewell

When I watched the YouTube video of her farewell concert last night, I felt a tinge of sadness. She isn’t much older than I am, and there she was on my iPad, celebrating more than sixty years of work. Where did those years go? And I am, in many ways, still at the beginning of my career as a novelist. Funny how life goes.

From memory to character

As a little wink to the young singer of 1964, I created Metsätähti to appear first in my coming-of-age story Handful and again in the following murder mystery, The Triumvirate Murders — Death as a Business Expense.

Watch the concert

Katri-Helena: ‘Viimeinen ilta’ (The Last Evening — concert)

If you’re Finnish, you’ll have one hour and forty-two minutes of nostalgia and six decades of melancholy. If you’re not, you might wonder what on earth this is. Either way, you’ll see an artist who captured the essence of a nation.

After the curtain falls

After Katri-Helena, Finland will never be quite as we remember it. Things have changed, and in our fragmented world, it’s hard to imagine a single artist again having such a profound, unifying impact.

And here is a little video about The Triumvirate Murders

Cheers

Janus

And rember to check these authors, too:

Janus Lucky
www.januslucky.com

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