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A review by peregrine
The Blood of Angels by Johanna Sinisalo
4.0
One-sentence recommendation: Read if you want slow-paced, meditative, atmospheric eco-SF with mythological roots.
The book alternates between chapters in first person from the perspective of Orvo, a beekeeper mourning his dead son Eero, and excerpts from Eero's animal rights blog, against the background of a near future in which the disappearance of the bees has started leading to catastrophic crop failure and food shortages. The blog sections are the passionate and opinionated writings of a young person, while Orvo's chapters are meditative and almost dream-like, and capture heartbreakingly well the feeling of a middle-aged man alone moving slowly through a mire of grief. The juxtaposition works extremely well (and I think a lot of credit needs to be given to the English translator, Lola Rogers, for the effectiveness of this even though translation).
The straightforwardness of the prose makes this a relatively fast read, despite its slow pace and lack of action (characteristics which, to be clear, I hold in its favor.)
Spoilers ahead:
The book ponders on the nature of death, the individual, and the place and responsibilities of humans in the world around them without quite providing definitive answers, which I like (though it definitely comes down against an anthropocentric view of nature). The blurb characterizes the book as a retelling of the Orpheus myth, which I didn't really see until near the end. While Orpheus' quest to regain Eurydice always felt fundamentally selfish to me, Orvo's attempt to bring back his son, while selfish at the beginning, eventually becomes selfless as he gives up the possibility of seeing Eero again himself in order to leave a natural "paradise" unspoiled by humans for the bees and for Eero. By bringing Eero to Other Place, Orvo doesn't quite live up to his own philosophy about the unimportance of an individual life compared to the well-being of the whole "hive", but by cutting off the gateway there, he puts the good of a much greater whole, the untouched ecology of another world, above the good of himself and even the rest of humanity.
The book alternates between chapters in first person from the perspective of Orvo, a beekeeper mourning his dead son Eero, and excerpts from Eero's animal rights blog, against the background of a near future in which the disappearance of the bees has started leading to catastrophic crop failure and food shortages. The blog sections are the passionate and opinionated writings of a young person, while Orvo's chapters are meditative and almost dream-like, and capture heartbreakingly well the feeling of a middle-aged man alone moving slowly through a mire of grief. The juxtaposition works extremely well (and I think a lot of credit needs to be given to the English translator, Lola Rogers, for the effectiveness of this even though translation).
The straightforwardness of the prose makes this a relatively fast read, despite its slow pace and lack of action (characteristics which, to be clear, I hold in its favor.)
Spoilers ahead:
The book ponders on the nature of death, the individual, and the place and responsibilities of humans in the world around them without quite providing definitive answers, which I like (though it definitely comes down against an anthropocentric view of nature). The blurb characterizes the book as a retelling of the Orpheus myth, which I didn't really see until near the end. While Orpheus' quest to regain Eurydice always felt fundamentally selfish to me, Orvo's attempt to bring back his son, while selfish at the beginning, eventually becomes selfless as he gives up the possibility of seeing Eero again himself in order to leave a natural "paradise" unspoiled by humans for the bees and for Eero. By bringing Eero to Other Place, Orvo doesn't quite live up to his own philosophy about the unimportance of an individual life compared to the well-being of the whole "hive", but by cutting off the gateway there, he puts the good of a much greater whole, the untouched ecology of another world, above the good of himself and even the rest of humanity.