From a New York Times review by Laird Hunt of the book by Emily St. John Mandel titled Sea of Tranquility”:
Let’s begin with a moment of beauty, one of many in Emily St. John Mandel’s time-leaping sixth novel, “Sea of Tranquility.” It comes in the second half of the book, which is set in part in Earth’s far-off future, as a woman takes a commercial flight back to her home on the moon:
“What it was like to leave Earth: a rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then — it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble — there was black space.”
That feeling of something lovely glimpsed and lost is everywhere in these pages — which makes sense considering that the exiles, grieving friends, lonely authors and lonelier time travelers Mandel sets in motion in this luminous follow-up to “Station Eleven” and “The Glass Hotel” are all trying, with varying degrees of success, to catch hold of what keeps eluding them. And whether that’s something they’ve had and lost, or something they want but can’t quite name, all feel adrift on the boundless seas of longing.
The novel opens in 1912, with a solo journey from England to Canada, undertaken after an act of modest rebellion by Edwin St. John St. Andrew, scion of an aristocratic family, results in his expulsion from home. The feckless young man’s melancholy ramble comes abruptly to an end following an inexplicable vision in a Vancouver forest and a mysterious encounter with a man named Gaspery Roberts. Then a new section begins, this one set more than a century in the future, with a woman named Mirella Kessler who has just learned that her estranged friend Vincent is dead. This section, too, refers to a vision in a forest and features the same Gaspery Roberts. We eventually turn to a third section, set almost two more centuries later, featuring yet another new character, but both the vision and Roberts are there as well.
In this way, the first 100 pages of the novel introduce a group of people, each wracked by loneliness or sadness or purposelessness, but all of whom have, in some way, experienced “a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse,” “an impression of being in some vast interior,” “notes of violin music,” “then an incomprehensible sound.” And though along the way we’ve met intriguing characters like Mirella and Vincent, who some will recognize from “The Glass Hotel,” and have spent time with a 23rd-century writer, Olive Llewellyn, who is unquestionably a stand-in for Mandel herself (Olive has become tremendously famous in part for having written a book about the aftermath of a fictional flu pandemic), this is where, as they say, things get interesting. Because this is where the novel catches up to the enigmatic Roberts.
Roberts grew up on the moon in the late 24th century. When the story turns, finally, to him, it’s the dawn of the 25th, and our mystery man is at loose ends, working as a house detective at the Grand Luna Hotel. Though relocated to the high-functioning Colony One, the nostalgia-prone Roberts is haunted by his upbringing in the relatively derelict Colony Two, a.k.a. the Night City, “the place where the sky was always black,” because the failure of the protective dome’s artificial lighting system was judged too expensive to fix. His work at the hotel, where he is paid just to be present and pay attention to what happens around him, would seem like dubious preparation for any other job, but he soon takes up a new position in his brilliant sister Zoey’s shop, a most curious entity called the Time Institute. At this point, there have already been hints about where and when his unusual new job will take him, but the why of his journey — an investigation into the anomalous vision, which may have alarming implications about the nature of reality — has yet to be unfurled.
Mandel has worked adroitly with multiple timelines in her previous books, leaping back and forth between the past, present and future to explore killer viruses and Madoff-inspired Ponzi schemes. Her characters, too, have frequently felt temporally discombobulated. In “The Glass Hotel,” for example, a key player, the above-mentioned Vincent, says, “I am aware of a border but I can’t tell which side I’m on, and it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next.” She also says, more plainly, “I am out of time.”
In this way, the first 100 pages of the novel introduce a group of people, each wracked by loneliness or sadness or purposelessness, but all of whom have, in some way, experienced “a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse,” “an impression of being in some vast interior,” “notes of violin music,” “then an incomprehensible sound.” And though along the way we’ve met intriguing characters like Mirella and Vincent, who some will recognize from “The Glass Hotel,” and have spent time with a 23rd-century writer, Olive Llewellyn, who is unquestionably a stand-in for Mandel herself (Olive has become tremendously famous in part for having written a book about the aftermath of a fictional flu pandemic), this is where, as they say, things get interesting. Because this is where the novel catches up to the enigmatic Roberts.
Roberts grew up on the moon in the late 24th century. When the story turns, finally, to him, it’s the dawn of the 25th, and our mystery man is at loose ends, working as a house detective at the Grand Luna Hotel. Though relocated to the high-functioning Colony One, the nostalgia-prone Roberts is haunted by his upbringing in the relatively derelict Colony Two, a.k.a. the Night City, “the place where the sky was always black,” because the failure of the protective dome’s artificial lighting system was judged too expensive to fix. His work at the hotel, where he is paid just to be present and pay attention to what happens around him, would seem like dubious preparation for any other job, but he soon takes up a new position in his brilliant sister Zoey’s shop, a most curious entity called the Time Institute. At this point, there have already been hints about where and when his unusual new job will take him, but the why of his journey — an investigation into the anomalous vision, which may have alarming implications about the nature of reality — has yet to be unfurled.
Mandel has worked adroitly with multiple timelines in her previous books, leaping back and forth between the past, present and future to explore killer viruses and Madoff-inspired Ponzi schemes. Her characters, too, have frequently felt temporally discombobulated. In “The Glass Hotel,” for example, a key player, the above-mentioned Vincent, says, “I am aware of a border but I can’t tell which side I’m on, and it seems I can move between memories like walking from one room to the next.” She also says, more plainly, “I am out of time.”
In “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandell makes that metaphor — feeling out of sync — quite literal and uses a machine to send Roberts and others out on missions across time. The 20th, 21st, 23rd and 25th centuries are all visited here with plenty of now-familiar, pop-culture concern about temporal health expressed along the way.
If this were a different sort of novel, it might be reasonable to fret that stories like Ray Bradbury’s classic “A Sound of Thunder,” novels like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” television shows like “Dr. Who,” certain episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” or even Disney’s recent madcap “Loki,” had done time travel stories better, or at least earlier, and in most cases with more elaborately imagined tech. But Mandel is interested in something other than limning the highs and lows of timeline trotting and figuring out what to do — it’s never good, is it? — when someone like Roberts steps off the path, as he eventually does, to try to help someone in the past. Indeed, though the speculative elements in “Sea of Tranquility” (which was written during the Covid-19 pandemic and discusses the crushing impact of pandemics more broadly) are set in service of an attempt to make some sense of huge societal and existential crises and pose good old questions like what does it mean to be alive, Mandel’s novel has more in common with tech-minimized sci-fi outings like Kazuo Ishiguro’s “Never Let Me Go.”
In “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandel offers one of her finest novels and one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction yet, but it is her ability to convincingly inhabit the ordinary, and her ability to project a sustaining acknowledgment of beauty, that sets the novel apart. As in Ishiguro, this is not born of some cheap, made-for-television, faux-emotional gimmick or mechanism, but of empathy and hard-won understanding, beautifully built into language, for all of us who inhabit this “green-and-blue world” and who one day might live well beyond.
It is that aspect of “Sea of Tranquility,” Mandel’s finely rendered, characteristically understated descriptions of the old-growth forests her characters walk through, the domed moon colonies some of them call home, the robot-tended fields they gaze over or the whooshing airship liftoff sound they hear even in their dreams, that will, for this reader at least, linger longest. One can only hope that the “Far Colonies” Mandel evokes but never really explores in “Sea of Tranquility” will figure, along with Gaspery Roberts or one or two of his fellows, in a future work.
Laird Hunt’s most recent novel, “Zorrie,” was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for fiction.
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