Blaine's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
…
“What are you working on these days? Are you able to work?”

“I’m writing this crazy sci-fi thing,” Olive said.

“Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”

“I don’t know much about it myself, to be honest. I don’t even know if it’s a novel or a novella. It’s actually kind of deranged.”

“I suppose anything written this year is likely to be deranged,” the journalist said, and Olive decided she liked her.

At the end of my review for The Glass Hotel, I asked “What were the odds that Ms. Mandel would release a book during the aftermath of the Great Recession about a pandemic, and then release a book during a pandemic about the Great Recession? The timing is almost impossible to believe.” But I was asking the wrong question. Because the timing of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel were, ultimately, unforeseeable coincidences. What I should have asked was “what story would an author as brilliant as Emily St. John Mandel choose to write during a pandemic after having lived the experience of becoming a world-famous author as a result of writing a post-pandemic novel a few years before an actual pandemic”?

Sea of Tranquility takes place in four different timelines. In 1918, Edwin St. Andrew is traveling through Canada after being exiled from his British family. In 2020, Mirella Kessler is in Manhattan looking for Vincent Alkaitis, the central character from The Glass Hotel. In 2203, author Olive Llewellyn—who’s most famous novel Marienbad was about a pandemic (“a scientifically implausible flu”) and its survivors—has left her home in the second moon colony to travel around Earth for a book tour. And finally, in 2401, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is investigating an anomaly in the North American wilderness that somehow links these threads together.

I do not want to say anymore about the plot of Sea of Tranquility for risk of spoilers. But I do want to get back to my question of what Ms. Mandel would write about during a pandemic, which means discussing Olive, as obvious a stand-in for an author as has happened in literature. On the surface, Ms. Mandel uses Olive to talk about book tours, discuss some of the casual sexism she faces from people for daring to be both a professional writer and a mother, and to talk some smack about a contemporary author that I think is Sally Rooney. Then the book goes further, using the book tour to have Olive defend the subtlety of her writing (deliberately anti-climatic as opposed to falsely cinematic) and to discuss why post-apocalyptic fiction has gotten so popular over the last decade. But ultimately, Ms. Mandel uses Olive to seemingly work through her own feelings of watching the birth of an actual pandemic, and underestimating how bad it would get, from her unique position as a writer most famous for a novel about a pandemic. Olive’s presence in the novel seems to be an attempt to grapple with superstitious feelings that she somehow wrote a pandemic into existence. It is fascinating, all the more so for taking place within a much larger story.

Sea of Tranquility is exactly what you’d expect from Emily St. John Mandel. It’s a beautiful story, and very well-plotted, moving back and forth over different time period to tell the slowly connecting stories. While not forming a trilogy with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel (because the latter takes place in our world while the former is, at least for now, truly fictional), Sea of Tranquility connects the two in a sort of triangle. The writing is dazzling, with exceptional characterization and descriptions, and without ever feeling forced or pretentious. Once again, Ms. Mandel has written an accessible, thought-provoking, moving work of literary fiction. Highly recommended.