Beasts of the Sea by Iida Turpeinen review – a hypnotic tale of the sea cow’s extinction | Fiction
IIn November 1741, Georg Wilhelm Steller, “theologian, naturalist and curious”, was shipwrecked on an island between Alaska and Russia. There he found, floating in the shallow waters, a vast sirenian, Hydrodamalis gigabytes, nine feet long and will soon be known as the Steller’s sea cow. After getting through the winter, largely by eating sea cows, the following August Steller and the survivors of the Great Northern Expedition left the island. In 30 years, the Steller’s sea cow was hunted to extinction.
After describing these events, Finnish author Iida Turpeinen’s debut novel goes on to describe the lives of other historical figures, each of whom is touched in one way or another by the sea cow, now reduced to bones. There’s Hampus Furuhjelm, governor of Alaska, searching for a complete skeleton, and his sister Constance, who finds peace and intellectual autonomy among her taxidermy collection. Later, there are Hilda Olson, scientific illustrator, and John Grönvall, specialist in reconstructing bird eggs, responsible for preparing the relics of a sea cow for the exhibition.
Other things beyond the sea cow connect these characters. Both Steller and Olson aspire to be remembered through the scientific naming of species, although it is only Steller, his desire resulting in the acquisition of specimens rather than the gentler process of illustration, who achieves his wish. Both Steller and Grönvall are plunged into the darkness of a scientific collection that, no matter how much it may enhance our understanding, necessarily results in destruction on one scale or another, while Constance and Olson find their intellect – and therefore their potential contributions – dismissed because of their gender. And in the background, there is a slowly emerging scientific understanding both that species extinction is possible and that it can be brought about by human action.
From any point of view – temporal, geographical, intellectual – it is a huge journey to take, but Turpeinen does it seemingly effortlessly. She writes in a fluid present tense, moving seamlessly from one character to the next, drawing us gently but firmly forward. The emotional details are artfully rendered, although in fairly general terms – Steller’s social inferiority to his ship’s officers, for example, and his frustration when they ignore his request for time to complete his work: “what a laughable scientist he is, surveying the new world from his cabin, where all he can do is imagine the contents of these islands.” The result is a book that reads almost hypnotically; a lot of them have been decorated in Finland and it’s easy to understand why.
There is, however, a downside to so much gentleness. The section on Hampus and Constance Furuhjelm, who also follows Hampus’s wife Anna, seems unclear. Moving from one film to the next, it’s unclear where the story lies, perhaps because the material provided by real lives often refuses to coalesce. The sea cow’s bones are the thread that connects this story to the others, but Hampus has more important things on his mind and Anna doesn’t even seem to notice them. The solution might be to give more space to inner lives and imagined desires – Constance in particular feels like an opportunity offered and then rejected – but that would have meant lingering here, with these people, when the novel should be elsewhere.
Hilda Olson also passes quickly. The same could be said of ideas that are raised and then abandoned. When his employer gives his sea cow skeleton to a colleague, they both have dinner to celebrate – but “they too have their differences: von Nordmann believes that to fully understand an animal you have to examine it alive… but Bonsdorff shakes his head. Oxygen circulating through an animal’s cells does not change its structure.” Here it seems like we come to a knot, but then, as soon as the thought has been put forward, we move on again. The culpability of science and its practitioners in the extinction of species – and by extension the tendency of humans to hide their destruction behind ideas of progress – persists without ever really being exposed. It’s a bit like taking a gallery tour led by a guide who is constantly paying attention to the time.
Maybe that’s unfair. Beasts of the Sea is undeniably very good – interesting; thoughtful; beautifully written. It’s just that I had the feeling that he also wanted something more. When Steller rows out to observe a sea cow, it doesn’t seem like enough. “He must get closer, see its organs and bones, he must measure it… Only by penetrating the surface can he understand the true nature of the sea cow.” I too would have liked to have had the time to see a little deeper.
