Emma's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility

Only Emily St. John Mandel can both rip your heart in half and stitch it back together again just the right way. Just like her other books, Sea of Tranquility is about the quiet and beautiful human empathy that can come out of tragic events. It's set up a bit like David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas: that is, like a sandwich. We start in the Edwardian era with a young Englishman adrift in Canada, skip to a jaded widow in 2020, then over to a writer in the 23rd century. After the middle section, we revisit these characters in reverse order, seeing them in completely new ways.

The middle section is where things start coming together. (Don't worry; I say nothing that's not on the jacket flap.) in 2402, a man named Gaspery, struggling to find his purpose in life, signs up to become a time travel agent and finds himself investigating an anomaly within the framework of the universe, centering around all these people. A time agent's job is not to interfere, but to investigate. Gaspery tries to hold himself to these principles, but it's hard to be a good time agent and a good person at the same time.

This book is more or less the perfect coalescence of all Mandel's talents as an author. Her worldbuilding, especially for the futuristic sections, is meticulous yet unobtrusive. Her thoughts on pandemics, storytelling, world's end, and the nature of reality are both incisive and elegantly stated. And as always, you can tell she thinks people can do a lot of good, and that they're worth saving.

Sea of Tranquility is as beautiful as its title. I'm tired of pandemic stories, but this one can stay.