John Mauro's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility

One of my most anticipated new releases of the year, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, turned out to be a watered-down rewrite of Cloud Atlas. If I were David Mitchell, I don't know whether I'd feel flattered or just profoundly ripped off.

Sea of Tranquility has exactly the same narrative structure as Cloud Atlas, consisting of interconnected stories that occur across different timelines, starting in the past and spanning into the future. Like Cloud Atlas, the opening storyline centers on a seafaring scholar traveling to the New World, whose "street smarts" pale in comparison to his "book smarts." Like Cloud Atlas, the next storylines involve a composer, an author, and a projection into a sci-fi future. Like Cloud Atlas, each storyline is interrupted partway through to begin the next nested story, and then all the stories wrap up in the second half of the book. The main difference is that the nested stories in Sea of Tranquility are only four layers deep, rather than six layers deep in Cloud Atlas.

Emily St. John Mandel's writing is beautiful, as usual. However, she uses exactly the same writing style for all storylines covering three hundred years of history. The same 2020 writing style is applied to the historical account from 1912 and to the futuristic stories taking place in 2203 and 2401. She doesn't even attempt to alter her writing style to reflect these time differences. This is in sharp contrast to David Mitchell, who dramatically adjusted his writing style to reflect each different time period. This included making a projection of how he thought the English language would evolve in the near and far futures. Mitchell accomplished this task brilliantly, although it certainly made Cloud Atlas more difficult to read than Sea of Tranquility. In this way, the writing in Sea of Tranquility is simultaneously beautiful and lazy. I wish Emily St. John Mandel would have tried harder to capture the differences in writing style that one would expect over a span of 300 years.

Like David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel is attempting to build an interconnected universe of characters spanning across books. However, the execution is quite clunky in Sea of Tranquility. The 2020 timeline overlaps with her previous novel, The Glass Hotel, and unfortunately the characters in the 2020 timeline of Sea of Tranquility spend about half of their dialogue recapping key plot points from The Glass Hotel. Also, the interconnections among the nested stories of Sea of Tranquility are made using a rather unconvincing time travel plot device, in contrast to the more subtle connections that David Mitchell provides in Cloud Atlas.

I really wanted to love this book. I gave five stars to The Glass Hotel, which was brilliant in its subtle use of magical realism. Emily St. John Mandel's previous post-apocalyptic novel, Station Eleven, was also vastly superior to Sea of Tranquility. I preordered Sea of Tranquiltiy months in advance, in eager anticipation of its release date. This was such a letdown. I would have been far better off just rereading Cloud Atlas.