Book Review: The Door on Half-Bald Hill
The Door on Half-Bald Hill by Helena Sorensen is my kind of book. Its landscape is bleak. It dwells on minute details of agrarian life, drawing meaning from small, mundane, ordinary chores. I absolutely loved that the setting is a tiny village inhabited by eighteen people and the reader gets to know each household in a memorable way. You leave the story feeling like you would recognize these folks if you ever were to stumble into a rural Celtic village and find yourself among them.
The pace of the story is slow and I confess I had to slog my way through some chapters. Not because I didn’t care for the characters or because there wasn’t enough at stake in the main character’s choices, but because the setting was so very, very hopeless and depressing. I kept going, though. I had enough trust in the author based on the first few chapters to convince myself that the culmination of her story would be worth my time.
I wasn’t wrong. This tale feels like an Old Testament epic put to modern script. The brilliant triumph of hope in the ending stirred my heart in a way nostalgic of scripture. I would recommend this title to anyone, but I think some of its depth will be lost on readers who don’t understand the symbolism in Sorensen’s imagery. I heard someone give a review of it and describe it as straying too far into paganism. This completely misses the point.
The story is completely steeped in Celtic culture, but the spiritual goings-on are Christianity clothed in pagan wreaths and linens. The people have three spiritual leaders—the druid, the bard, the ovate—which used to be one office that was split. I won’t give too much of a spoiler, but this relates very much to the Old Testament offices of prophet, priest, and king. As we know, all of these offices were fulfilled and will be consummated in Christ Jesus. I think that the druidism of this story doesn’t take away from the depth of Christian truth Sorensen pocketed inside her narrative. Rather, it adds color, blending a Christian message seamlessly with the aesthetic of the Celt-inspired fantasy world she’s created.
Helena Sorensen published this book in 2020, and I imagine it was something she’d been working on for some time. But the timeliness of her novel is astounding. Her characters are dealing with their own plague, just as panic-stricken voices from every side lambasted us that year. But her village folk face a future far more disheartening, deadly and divisive than ours—someone has come back from the dead with a message: “death is freedom, embrace it”. Meanwhile, our world is so afraid of dying that we’re willing to do anything, cut ourselves off from anyone, even those most precious to us, in order to survive.
A lot of art came out of the pandemic. The Door on Half-Bald Hill might be one of the best works I’ve seen from this era, as far as having something worthwhile to say to the issues at the forefront of everyone’s minds. I’ll be checking out Helena Sorensen’s fantasy trilogy next, and I hear she’s working on another standalone in the same vein as Door on Half-Bald Hill. If you pick up one of her novels, let me know what you think!
