Beasts of the Sea
In the mid-18th century, Georg Wilhelm Steller is a “theologian, naturalist, and curious man.” Commander Vitus Bering (of Bering Strait and Sea) is on a mission to chart a route from Asia to the Americas. Steller joins the expedition, and when disaster strikes, “he knows with absolute certainty that they are lost, but his horror is mixed with a strange sense of elation: the discovery of the sea cow is his alone.” Steller’s Sea Cow, an enormous Sirenian, is already on the verge of extinction when Steller attempts to describe it and preserve a specimen. Jumping forward 100 years, Alaska’s new governor, overwhelmed by a territory whose initial promise is coming to naught and taking his career with it, recovers the skeleton of Steller’s Sea Cow. His sister cares for it and other Alaskan specimens, which eventually end up in a Helsinki museum, to be meticulously captured there by a female illustrator. Finally, in 1952, the skeleton undergoes restoration by John Grönvall, a conservationist “given the task of putting together the first of the disappeared species that forced humans to look at themselves in the mirror” – to acknowledge the possibility of man-made extinction.
This is a novel in translation, and the language is evocative, transportive, thought-provoking. Its exploration of the natural sciences is fascinating, it wears its research effortlessly, hews as closely to history as possible, and “takes the liberty to use imagination” with infinite subtlety for the rest. This guarantees standout status in a genre currently plagued by presentism and dead horses of the same themes/settings constantly beaten to an ahistorical, juvenile, boring pulp. Turpeinen’s debut exhibits universal verisimilitude of characterization and everything else. Her story of the Sea Cow is exemplary historical fiction and a haunting paean to all extinct species – a fleeting moment of “all-consuming sorrow upon beholding this creature… so irrevocably departed.”
