A Book A Week

 "A life lived in simulation is still a life."

Emily St. John Mandel is an author who has been on my radar for several years. I've seen glowing reviews of her previous novels The Glass Hotel and Station Eleven, but I've never gotten around to reading them. Like other much-hyped books, I added them to my TBR list and then ignored them. Her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, was published earlier this year, and the reviews have been glowing once again. Comparisons to David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a novel that both mesmerized and confounded me, piqued my interest even more. I decided it was finally time to read a Mandel novel, and Sea of Tranquility would be a perfect place to begin. 

What is reality? How do we decipher what is valid from what is imagined? These questions mark the impetus of this novel. It opens in 1912 with Edwin, a young man who has been castigated from his family and his home country in embarrassment. He couldn't keep his mouth shut, and now he finds himself halfway across the world, landing in Western Canada's wilderness. As he wanders the forest, Edwin steps into a place that leaves him questioning his very sanity. "He steps forward into a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound—."

Just as we begin to grapple with the implications of what Edwin experiences, Mandel thrusts us forward a hundred years. We see a composer giving a lecture about his composition that centers around a video recorded by his sister. In the recording, she is seen walking through the forest when time and space seem to blip. Again, before we have time to wrestle with what we read, Mandel moves us forward to the year 2203. We meet a novelist who is on a book tour promoting her latest work. The tour has taken her from her home on a moon colony back to earth. As she laments missing her family, news breaks of a plague beginning to spread on the planet. In a fiction that mirrors Madel's own reality, the author must face promoting her book amongst the spread of a life-threatening illness. 

It isn't until the mid-point of the novel that things begin to come into focus. We land in the year 2401, to a world (galaxy may be more apt) that is completely transformed. Humanity exists in domed colonies, a reality that is both alien and familiar. Gaspery, a man we've seen glimpses of in the preceding stories, is fully introduced as a nightwatchman of a hotel, a job he hates. His sister works at a more exciting, but secretive, gig as a scientist who has been investigating anomalies in time and space. She reveals to Gaspery that different centuries and realities are bleeding into each other, an oddity that is without explanation. Gaspery, desperate to shake his dead-end job, agrees to assist her in traveling across time to get to the bottom of this strange aberration. 

With Sea of Tranquility Emily St. John Mandel takes her readers on a journey across time and space, daring us to ask big questions and to find answers nestled in unlikely places. From a sheer construction standpoint, the novel is a mastery of craft and plotting. Each story corresponds to the next and vice versa creating a nesting doll effect. Yes, other authors have used this device before, but perhaps none to such a rewarding effect. I'll admit to being a bit discombobulated at first. It was hard to see the forest from the trees, especially as Mandel thrust us forward in time with each new section. This confusion is resolved by introducing a character who is able to traverse time, giving us readers someone to help make sense of how everything is connected. Despite the narrative wizardry at play here, Mandel manages to ground her work in characters who glimmer with reality, even when that reality is so different from our own. Ultimately it is the way these characters, love, and lament that makes Sea of Tranquility truly shine. 

For more information visit the author's website, Amazon, and Goodreads. 

(2022, 45)