Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St John Mandel - Paul
After thoroughly enjoying Station Eleven recently I’d promised myself I’d read more from Emily St John Mandel, and then I read the blurb for this and couldn’t resist.
To summarise the blurb: in 1912, Edwin is exiled to Canada from English society. In British Columbia, he walks into the virgin forest and for a split second all is darkness, the notes of a violin echoing unnaturally through the air. 200 years later, Olive, a famous writer, is visiting Earth from her home in the second moon colony, undertaking a global book tour as a pandemic begins its spread. In her most famous novel, a man plays a violin in an airship terminal as the trees of a forest momentarily appear around him. Another 200 years pass, and Gaspery, a detective in the moon’s Night City, is tasked with interviewing Edwin and Olive in order to help solve the mystery of an anomaly in time.
This took me back to reading mid-century speculative fiction, and I mean that as a huge compliment. The what-ifs and anomalies, the expanding human universe, the possibilities of time travel, parallel worlds, reality shifts, the elements of dystopia, but also the optimism for the future in spite of everything.
The plotting, the storytelling, every aspect of this book is note-perfect. As I was reading it, each reveal left me wishing I was reading alongside somebody else so that I could talk about it. In Station Eleven I thought there were elements of Vonnegut in the positioning of a work of fiction as a key driver of the story, and in this book, Mandel takes this another step further – though I won’t say any more as the moments of metafiction are so delightful that I don’t want to spoil them for anyone. My only advice would be to read Station Eleven first, if you haven’t already, then dive straight into this.
As ever, if you read this, please come in and talk to me about it, I’m bursting to discuss it with somebody! This is only the second of Emily St John Mandel’s novels that I’ve read but I’m determined to catch up on more.
- Paul
