Sea of Tranquility
Cover of the first U.S. edition
AuthorEmily St. John Mandel
Audio read byJohn Lee, Dylan Moore, Arthur Morey, Kirsten Potter
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish
PublisherAlfred A. Knopf (USA)
Pan Macmillan (UK)
Publication date
5 April 2022
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages255
ISBN9780593321447
(First Edition U.S. Hardcover)
OCLC1251739463
813/.6
LC ClassPR9199.4.M3347 S43 2022
Websitewww.emilymandel.com/sea-of-tranquility

Sea of Tranquility is a 2022 novel by the Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel. It is Mandel's sixth novel and a work of speculative fiction.[1][2]

Written during the COVID-19 pandemic,[2] the novel considers "what constitutes reality, how time flows, and what memory is in the context of perception"[3] by pondering the simulation hypothesis and time travel.

Name

The novel is named after the Mare Tranquillitatis, a lunar mare. In the novel, the lunar mare is the site of the first extraterrestrial human colony.[4]

Plot

Edwin (1912)

In 1912, Edwin St. John St. Andrew, youngest grandson of an English earl, scandalizes his father at a dinner party by criticizing the British Raj, and is exiled to Canada as a remittance man.[3] Passive in nature,[3] Edwin drifts from Halifax west to Victoria, British Columbia. Beset by ennui toward Victoria's similarity to English high society,[5] Edwin travels to Caiette, a fictional settlement (which also appeared in Mandel's previous novel The Glass Hotel) on the sparsely-inhabited Vancouver Island.[6] Venturing into a forest, Edwin is overwhelmed by momentarily experiencing being within a vast, dark space, hearing a violin and other sounds he cannot recognize. A stranger named Roberts, claiming to be a priest, questions him about this experience, but flees when Edwin becomes suspicious.[4]

Mirella (2020)

In January 2020, years after Vincent Alkaitis's disappearance during the events of The Glass Hotel, her friend, Mirella Kessler, seeking her whereabouts, attends an audiovisual art performance by Vincent's brother, Paul Smith.[4][2] Paul plays a childhood video filmed by Vincent in which, like Edwin, she is momentarily transported from a forest to a dark, train station-like space where a violin is heard.[4] Mirella is devastated upon learning of Vincent's disappearance at sea.[4] Then, as a man named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts (who accidentally betrays foreknowledge of the COVID-19 pandemic) questions her about the video, Mirella is disturbed to recognize him, seemingly not having aged, from a traumatic murder scene which she witnessed as a child in Ohio.[4]

Olive (2203)

In 2203, novelist Olive Llewellyn, a native of a Moon colony, is away from her husband and daughter on a weeks-long Earthbound international book tour.[4] She headlines numerous media events and lectures, promoting her breakthrough novel, Marienbad, about an imaginary influenza pandemic; all the while, reports of a string of real-world viral outbreaks escape her attention.[4] Gaspery-Jacques, who shares the first name of a character in Marienbad, interviews Olive as a journalist, and questions her about a passage in Marienbad describing a character in a spaceport hearing a violin and being transported.[4]

Gaspery-Jacques (2401)

Two centuries after Olive's time, Gaspery-Jacques (who was indeed named after the character she created) works an uneventful job as a hotel detective in another Moon colony.[2][4] His prodigy sister, Zoey, who followed in their late mother's footsteps as a physicist, confides in him her research into Edwin, Vincent, and Olive's experiences of having swapped places, impossibly, across centuries.[4] Zoey believes that this anomaly supports the simulation hypothesis, their mother's field of research, if it represents data corruption in the simulation.[5]

Zoey admits that she works, under strict secrecy, at the Time Institute, a government agency wielding sole legal authority over time travel, which will officially investigate this anomaly. Impatient to escape his humdrum life, and despite warnings about the institute's ruthless bureaucracy, Gaspery-Jacques discovers a mutual friend at the Institute who eagerly recruits him to join the investigation.[7] After years of training, Gaspery-Jacques travels to the past to interview each possible witness of the anomaly.[4] Because he is officially briefed on each interviewee's life and ultimate fate, he is warned that deliberately changing the past, however well-intentioned, is punishable by being forcibly stranded in the past.[4]

After uneventfully interviewing Alan Sami, an elderly man who played the violin in Oklahoma City Airship Terminal, Gaspery-Jacques interviews Olive, also learning little. Knowing that she is about to die during an imminent global pandemic, he defies protocols and warns her to return home immediately. Trusting his warning, Olive avoids her fate and safely reunites with her family as the pandemic erupts.

Zoey urges Gaspery-Jacques to go on the lam, but he persuades her to help him continue investigating the anomaly, incriminating herself as well. He witnesses the anomaly at the same time as Vincent, then travels to 1918 to accomplish his true goal: to personally assure Edwin of his sanity, saving him from being committed to an insane asylum.[8]: 219  Returning to the Time Institute, Gaspery-Jacques is arrested alongside Zoey, but he does not regret his actions even upon learning that Edwin's ultimate death from the Spanish flu remains unchanged.[8]: 224  Gaspery-Jacques's punishment is carried out by forced time-travel to 20th-century Ohio, where, at the murder scene that Mirella witnessed, he is framed and left to be arrested and sentenced to life in prison.

Years later, Zoey, who has joined another organization with time travel technology, saves a sixty-year-old Gaspery-Jacques from his incarceration, bringing him to safe lodging near Oklahoma City in 2172. To evade the Time Institute, he receives a new identity and facial surgery, becoming Alan Sami. He realizes that he himself will cause the anomaly by the meeting of his past and future selves at the spaceport.[9] Decades later, having learned the violin and moved to Oklahoma City, Alan plays at the Airship Terminal on the destined day, seeing reality corrupt and repair itself as Edwin, Vincent, Olive, and his past selves all appear before him.

Themes and influences

The character of Edwin is loosely based on one of Mandel's great-grandfathers.[10]

Many reviewers (Ron Charles, Yvonne C. Garrett, Laird Hunt, Bethanne Patrick and Marcel Theroux) have remarked on the similarities between Olive and Mandel: Like Mandel's Station Eleven, Olive has written a book about a fictional pandemic before an actual pandemic happened.[4][2][1][5][7] Laird Hunt calls Olive "unquestionably a stand-in for Mandel herself".[2] Garrett has argued in her review of Sea of Tranquility, that Mandel − through the eyes of Olive − has detailed her own experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, which occurred during the writing of the novel.[4] An example of this is a sentence detailing the human experience of the pandemic: "the panic, the lockdown, the constant sirens, technology exhaustion, the shifting and rethinking of personal and career priorities."[4]

Adaptation

In April 2022, it was announced that HBO Max will adapt the novel and The Glass Hotel into television series, each produced by Paramount Television Studios with Mandel and Patrick Somerville co-writing.[11][12]

Reception

Reviews

At the review aggregator website Book Marks, which assigns individual ratings to book reviews from mainstream literary critics, the novel received a cumulative "rave" rating based on 35 reviews: one "pan", three "mixed", and the other reviews being either "rave" or "positive".[13]

Yvonne C. Garrett has called Sea of Tranquility in The Brooklyn Rail "beautifully written" being an "equal parts vast and intimate, quiet and thrilling contemplation on humanity, physics, time, and what it means to be alive."[4] In The Guardian, Marcel Theroux considered the work to be "hugely ambitious in scope, yet also intimate and written with a graceful and beguiling fluency".[1] In his mind "the keynote of this book" was that "[s]omeone's world is always ending".[1] Ron Charles sees Sea of Tranquility in The Washington Post as "science fiction that keeps its science largely in abeyance, as dark matter for a story about loneliness, grief and finding purpose."[5] Laird Hunt argued in The New York Times that Sea of Tranquility is "one of [Mandel's] finest novels" and "one of her most satisfying forays into the arena of speculative fiction".[2] Bethanne Patrick saw "a novel that is pure pleasure to read." In the Los Angeles Times she argued that Mandel is a superb stylist – "you see the strands and later the beautiful results, but your eyes simply cannot follow what comes in between."[7]

Constance Grady, writing for Vox, reviewed the plot more critically. She argues that the "loveliness of Mandel's sentences [...] stands in jarring contrast to the clumsiness of her plotting." In her mind "[t]he different sections of this novel are linked by a time travel mystery, and the mystery's resolution [...] is so pat and clichéd that if [she] were to describe [...] the setup [...] [one] would know immediately how it all worked out."[14] Writing in the Financial Times, Christian Lorentzen sees the work in a clearly negative light: He argued that "Sea of Tranquility is a book where every new element subtracts from the reader’s experience. The characters are simplistic, the dialogue flat, and the descriptive passages exercise either in gauzy wonder at nature or dreary despair about the dehumanised technoscape. A book like Sea of Tranquility is a sign of a genre’s exhaustion."[15]

In the Washington Independent Review of Books, Andrea M. Pawley has remarked on the similarities between the novel and Last Year at Marienbad, a 1961 avant-garde French film, and stated that "the work informed St. John Mandel's writing of this novel".[3]

Accolades

In 2022, the book was listed on Barack Obama's annual summer reading list[16][17] and named as one of his favorite books of the year.[18][19] The novel was longlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.[20] It was picked by Stephen Bush as one of the Financial Times critics’ picks for best books of 2022.[21] Furthermore, it was one of Amazon's 20 Best Books of the Year for 2022.[22]

The novel won the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Science Fiction 2022.[23]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Theroux, Marcel (20 April 2022). "Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel review – time-travel drama". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 18 May 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Hunt, Laird (30 March 2022). "A Dazzling New Foray into Speculative Fiction From Emily St. John Mandel". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 10 May 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Pawley, Andrea M. (11 April 2022). "Sea of Tranquility: A Novel". Washington Independent Review of Books. Archived from the original on 22 May 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Garrett, Yvonne C. (April 2022). "Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility". The Brooklyn Rail. Archived from the original on 16 May 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  5. 1 2 3 4 Charles, Ron (12 April 2022). "Emily St. John Mandel's 'Sea of Tranquility' is a mind-bending novel". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 15 May 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  6. ↑ Zutter, Natalie (4 April 2022). "'Sea of Tranquility' reflects our pandemic woes through a time-travel lens". NPR. Archived from the original on 18 May 2022. Retrieved 11 June 2022.
  7. 1 2 3 Patrick, Patrick (4 April 2022). "Review: Emily St. John Mandel gets back to the future". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on 27 April 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  8. 1 2 St. John Mandel, Emily (2022). Sea of Tranquility. Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780593321447.
  9. ↑ Nguyen, Sophia (11 April 2022). "Emily St. John Mandel's Neatly Designed Worlds". The Nation. Archived from the original on 5 June 2022. Retrieved 6 June 2022.
  10. ↑ Gordon, Doug (7 May 2022). "Emily St. John Mandel's 'Sea of Tranquility' traverses across almost 500 years". Wisconsin Public Radio. Archived from the original on 15 July 2022. Retrieved 15 July 2022.
  11. ↑ Andreeva, Nellie (1 April 2022). "'Station Eleven's Emily St. John Mandel & Patrick Somerville Team For 'The Glass Hotel' & 'Sea of Tranquility' Series Adaptations in Work at HBO Max". Deadline Hollywood. Archived from the original on 19 May 2022. Retrieved 2 April 2022.
  12. ↑ Waldman, Katy (1 April 2022). "The Rewriting of Emily St. John Mandel". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 5 April 2022. Retrieved 6 June 2022.
  13. ↑ "Book Marks: Sea of Tranquility". Book Marks. Archived from the original on 28 April 2022. Retrieved 6 June 2022.
  14. ↑ Grady, Constance (26 April 2022). "The author of Station Eleven wrote a new pandemic novel". Vox. Archived from the original on 8 May 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  15. ↑ Lorentzen, Christian (13 April 2022). "Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel – a sci-fi epic from the Station Eleven author". Financial Times. Archived from the original on 21 April 2022. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
  16. ↑ "Barack Obama names novels by Canadians Emily St. John Mandel, Silvia Moreno-Garcia among 2022 favourites". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 26 July 2022. Archived from the original on 31 July 2022. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  17. ↑ Barack Obama [@BarackObama] (26 July 2022). "I've read a couple of great books this year and wanted to share some of my favorites so far. What have you been reading this summer?" (Tweet). Retrieved 31 July 2022 – via Twitter.
  18. ↑ "Barack Obama names books by Canadians Emily St. John Mandel and Kate Beaton among his favourite reads of 2022". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 28 December 2022. Archived from the original on 29 December 2022. Retrieved 29 December 2022.
  19. ↑ Barack Obama [@BarackObama] (23 December 2022). "I always look forward to sharing my lists of favorite books, movies, and music with all of you. First up, here are some of the books I read and enjoyed this year. Let me know which books I should check out in 2023" (Tweet). Retrieved 29 December 2022 – via Twitter.
  20. ↑ "2023 Winners". American Library Association. 11 October 2022. Archived from the original on 11 October 2022. Retrieved 14 October 2022.
  21. ↑ "Best books of 2022: FT critics' picks". Financial Times. 26 November 2022. Archived from the original on 26 November 2022. Retrieved 26 November 2022.
  22. ↑ Giardina, Victoria (22 November 2022). "Amazon just released its 20 Best Books of the Year: Shop them now". New York Post. Archived from the original on 25 November 2022. Retrieved 26 November 2022.
  23. ↑ "Announcing the Goodreads Choice Winner in Best Science Fiction!". Goodreads. Archived from the original on 9 December 2022. Retrieved 9 December 2022.
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