EMILY ST JOHN MANDEL Sea of Tranquility. Reviewed by Amelia Dudley
The author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel travels through time in her new novel.
If there’s pleasure in action, there’s peace in stillness.
Emily St John Mandel takes us on a delightfully strange journey through time in her latest novel. In the distant future, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts is investigating an anomaly in time and finds lives torn apart in its wake. In 1912, Edwin St Andrew is sent to Canada after embarrassing his well-to-do English family at a dinner party in England. On a walk in the Canadian wilderness, he is left shaken and fearing for his sanity. Just for a moment, the world had gone dark and he heard a violin and a strange noise that he could not explain.
Two centuries later, author Olive Llewellyn embarks on a book tour around Earth, missing her home and family in the second moon colony. Her most popular novel contains an anomalous passage describing a man with a violin busking at an airship terminal, and just for a moment, a forest appears.
A childhood friend of Gaspery’s also gets caught up in time travel.
There’s a sort of elegance in the novel’s bursts of prose, structured into short chapters. The story starts with awkward and observant early-twentieth-century Edwin contemplating the wilderness:
‘And how’s your brother?’ Thomas asks, changing the subject. He means Niall.
‘Making a go of it in Australia,’ Edwin says. ‘He seems happy enough, judging by his letters.’
‘Well, that’s more than most of us can say,’ Thomas says. ‘No small thing, happiness. What’s he doing down there?’
‘Drinking away his remittance money, I’d imagine,’ Edwin says, which is ungentlemanly but also the probable truth. They have a table by the window, and his gaze keeps drifting to the street, the shop fronts, and – visible in the distance – the unfathomable wilderness, dark towering trees crowding in around the periphery. There’s something ludicrous about the idea that the wilderness belongs to Britain, but he quickly suppresses this thought, because it reminds him of his last dinner party in England.
There are some cute observations during Olive’s chapters about being a successful author and going around meeting a frightening number of people, which you can imagine are somewhat autobiographical, likewise the parts about surviving a lockdown as a parent. This novel contains a lot about and is heavily inspired by COVID-19, which could potentially be wearying, depending on whether you feel that it is too soon to be reading about such things. But I found what this book had to say about pandemics and lockdowns. and the strange sort of denial that occurs before the word ‘pandemic’ actually gets used, oddly wholesome. There are some good points about the benefit of hindsight, too, as well as some interesting historical details about past pandemics, without being heavy-handed.
But there’s so much else happening that the overall story is certainly not about COVID-19, and the main message is very life-affirming.
There are plenty of funny moments and little gems of wisdom:
Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.
This is a great time-travel story that touches on the need for extreme detachment on the part of the traveller. As Gaspery’s investigation into the anomaly and the lives of those touched by it draws to a close, he begins to understand that he cannot outrun fate.
Think of this story as some wacky, beautiful quilt. You probably won’t understand how it all fits together until the end, but it really doesn’t matter as you’ll enjoy the ride.
Emily St John Mandel Sea of Tranquility Picador 2022 PB 224pp $32.99
Amelia Dudley has degrees in plant biology and currently works as a tutor.
You can buy Sea of Tranquillity from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW or you can buy it from Booktopia.
You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.
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