Sea of Tranquility: A novel

Excellent book. Fully-formed characters, steady pace, the story is multi-threaded yet never becomes confusing. Dramatic yet gentle. Loved the writing style. Highly recommend, especially if you want some refreshingly new science fiction.

“No star burns forever.” - Sea of Tranquility.Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.I was so excited for this book and as per usual, Emily St. John Mandel did not disappoint. After reading the synopsis, I had no idea what kind of book this would be, but I ended up being blown away. There are so many little details and plot points in this book that come together beautifully and make this story unique. Since this book follows several points of view, there is a lot to keep up on, but I never found it confusing and felt that each voice was distinct. In addition, the prose is wonderfully done and so lyrical making it easy to read. I definitely would recommend this book and others by Emily St. John Mandel if you haven’t read them yet.

Enjoyable, thought provoking and moving. The time travel story is not new but the characters have depth and are not afraid to care

I'm a huge fan of Mandel, having first read the stunning Station Eleven about 4 years ago. I next read The Glass Hotel and enjoyed it so much, my curiosity was stoked, and I quickly read all three of her earliest novels. I loved them all, particularly The Singer's Gun, and the way she was effortlessly able to create an amazing page-turning tension, a sense of dread throughout her storytelling. I'd compare those books to much of Patricia Highsmith's novels but I actually prefer Mandel's writing.So I very eagerly jumped into Sea of Tranquility with the highest hopes and found the first two parts, the non-futuristic parts, intriguing and engaging. But as the book went on into the distant future and then even more distant future, I lost patience a bit. I couldn't quite see what was relating all of the characters and it began to feel like ideas for several books that never cohered. Finally, in the last chapters, much was explained (and I'll admit that smarter minds than mine might have seen what was coming sooner), but it ultimately all felt rather lame and insufficient for the grand ideas that were being expostulated.I'm still pleased to award this book 3 stars because so much of the writing, the descriptions of characters and places, is up to Mandel's usual standards. It was a page-turner for me as I read it in two days. And I'd recommend it to any Mandel fans just because you'll reacquaint yourself with some characters from previous books and truly enjoy the character who is clearly based on herself.

Sea of Tranquility“A simulated life is still a life”(Gaspery, a character in Sea of Tranquility)Sea of TranquilityBy Emily St. John MandelKnopf: 272 pages, $25Emily St. John Mandel is a Canadian writer with a marvelous talent for taking old stories, i.e., pandemics, Ponzi schemes, or time travel, and making them fresh. Sea of Tranquility, Mandel’s new novel, demonstrates this. Mandel is often labeled as an author of speculative fiction, science fiction, and auto-fiction. She can combine many plots and have multiple characters, some of them appearing from novel to novel, and yet she ties the threads together.Here is a sample of her clear but often lyrical prose:“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.”A single surreal incident is the core event of Sea of Tranquility.In 1912, an 18-year-old Englishman named Edwin St. John St. Andrew, disillusioned with the British Empire, meets a mysterious stranger and then walks into a Canadian forest. Underneath a giant maple tree, he suddenly feels he is in some vast interior, like a train station or a cathedral. There are notes of violin music. Edwin is terrified by a combination of unearthly sounds. Is he going mad? In 1994, a young woman named Vincent is filming the same tree and sky and hears violin music and unexplained sounds. The same stranger is lurking in the forest.Is time, itself, unraveling with one event bleeding into other time periods? Are there parallel worlds in everyone’s personal story?At a party, years later, Vincent meets a visitor who reveals her spouse is running a Ponzi scheme and that she and her friends will be ruined in a few months. In another scene, a writer named Olive Llewellyn—not unlike Mandel—is warned by the same mysterious visitor to cancel her book tour because something deadly (a pandemic) will soon happen.The mystery man is a time traveler detective named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts living on the moon in the 25th century in a colony called the Night City. He works for a sinister organization called the Time Institute. Gaspery’s assignment is to travel back into the past and discover why separate incidents from different centuries are rupturing and overlapping into each other.Here is where Mandel gets complex with stories within stories.Mandel’s fictional character, novelist Olive Llewellyn, has an individual named Gaspery in her bestseller Marienbad, which was released in the 23rd century. Marienbad is a dystopian novel she wrote on the brink of an actual pandemic. Ironically, this parallels Mandel herself whose huge hit, Stations Eleven—about a pandemic—was published before the COVID-19 pandemic occurred. When it did, Mandel resented being called a prophet.Eventually, Gaspery travels back in time to visit Edwin, now a disabled veteran from World War I, and explains to him what his 1912 encounter means. Edwin recognizes Gaspery as the weird stranger from his past. If Edwin is suffering from the war, at least the forest vision was not a hallucination caused by mental illness. This action marks Gaspery as an outlaw and eventual fugitive because he has violated a Time Institute rule of never revealing his purpose.Critics have high praise for Sea of Tranquility. Maureen Corrigan of NPR had this to say: “Sea of Tranquility is a poignant, ingeniously constructed and deeply absorbing novel that surveys big questions about the cruel inevitability of time passing, loss, the nature of what we consider reality and, in the end, what finally matters.”Here is Laird Hunt: “Following a superb stylist like Mandel is like watching an expert lacemaker at work: You see the strands and later the beautiful results, but your eyes simply cannot follow what comes in between. As in her best work, including Station Eleven, she is less concerned with endings than with continuity.”Sea of Tranquility ends with an extraordinary reveal.If Emily St. John Mandel’s world is always ending, there remains a sense that Mandel’s very human characters, living and dead, will return to haunt the readers.