Sea of Tranquility. By Emily St John Mandel. Knopf; 272 pages; $25. Picador; £14.99
IN HER TWO most recent novels, Emily St John Mandel introduced a broad cast of characters who emerge from the wreckage of a unifying upheaval. Now adapted for television, “Station Eleven”—a smash hit published in 2014—plays out in the aftermath of a flu pandemic that decimates the world’s population. “The Glass Hotel” (2020) deals with the fallout from a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that wipes out fortunes, reputations and savings.
The characters in the Canadian author’s latest book find themselves struggling to make sense of a moment of dislocation, rather than a life-changing disaster. Compared with its predecessors, the low-stakes set-up hints at a scaled-back drama. But “Sea of Tranquility” proves to be a bold and exciting novel, which manages to explore modern-day concerns while travelling in and out of the familiar world and backwards and forwards in time.
It begins in 1912 with 18-year-old Edwin St Andrew, the son of an English aristocrat, who is banished to Canada after making an unpalatable comment about empire during a dinner party. At a remote spot on Vancouver Island he enters a forest and is disorientated by a flash of darkness, notes from a violin and the fleeting sensation of being in a vast, cavernous space.
The next section unfolds in New York in 2020. Paul Smith, a composer and video artist, shows his audience footage of his half-sister Vincent—a main character in “The Glass Hotel”—having a similarly strange experience in a forest. Then in 2203 Olive Llewellyn, an author, leaves her home in the second Moon colony and journeys to the Atlantic Republic on Earth to promote her novel about a pandemic, just as a new virus is rearing its head in Australia. One odd scene in Olive’s book, inspired by an event in her life, involves a character who, like Edwin and Vincent, suffers a hallucinatory funny turn, in this case in the Airship Terminal in Oklahoma City.
These disparate narrative strands are woven together in the book’s fourth section, set in 2401. Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is tasked with travelling back through the centuries to solve a mystery. What Paul thought was a glitch on a tape turns out to be an anomaly in time. But Gaspery’s mission comes freighted with great difficulty—“How do you investigate reality?” he asks—along with considerable danger.
“Sea of Tranquility” is Ms Mandel’s most ambitious novel yet (which is saying something). It is consistently inventive and occasionally mind-bending, thanks to her disrupted timelines and fully realised vision of lunar settlements and parallel universes. And yet her sci-fi realm is not entirely alien.
Amid the speculation she prioritises the human factor, following individuals as they fall out of love, miss and mourn those dearest to them and search for meaning and fulfilment. Her depiction of a future pandemic is recognisable and touching. It adds up to an illuminating study of survival and, in the words of one character, “what makes a world real”.
This story was first published in The Economist’s weekly edition on April 16th, 2022.
