Welcome back to Back Shelf Saturdays, where I review backlist titles I didn’t get to read when they were first published. I do this (almost) every week to ensure I’m reading more than just newly released and forthcoming titles. For my purposes, a backlist title is at least one year past its release date.
This week’s title is Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel. Sea of Tranquility won the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Science Fiction and the 2023 Ictineu Prize. In addition, it was nominated for the 2023 Locus Award for Science Fiction. Emily St. John Mandel is also the author of the well-loved novel, Station Eleven. Station Eleven just so happens to be one of my favorite novels of all time, so I had a lot of nervous expectations going into Sea of Tranquility.
| Title: Sea of Tranquility | Author: Emily St. John Mandel |
| Release Date: April 5, 2022 | Genre: Sci-Fi / Literary Fiction |
Synopsis
A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
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 best-selling 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 black-skied 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.
A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.’
Review:
It took me a few chapters to settle into Sea of Tranquility, but once I felt comfortable in the character’s voices, I couldn’t get enough of this novel. St. John Mandel’s narrative voice in Sea of Tranquility is mature and deeply self-referential. Like other pandemic and post-pandemic novels, there’s an anxious quality to Sea of Tranquility, but due to the different timelines, I never felt overwhelmed by it.
Like Station Eleven, Sea of Tranquility takes many different points of view that are seemingly unconnected and creates one single story. The cast of characters in Sea of Tranquility spans centuries. There’s a hotel detective on one of Earth’s colonies in the 2400s. There’s a privileged British man in 1912 who travels to Canada seeking adventure and meaning. There’s a young woman named Vincent in videoing the woods around her home in the 1990s. Lastly, and most poignantly, a post-apocalyptic author is doing a book tour in the middle of a pandemic in 2401.
Like a magician pulling off his best trick, St. John Mandel scatters all her characters one final time and then pulls them all together. It shouldn’t work. With the novel almost over, I didn’t see how it would. But, with a deft hand, St. John Mandel makes it look effortless.
Final Thoughts:
Sea of Tranquility is breathtaking. The ending is incomparable. I don’t know if any novel can ever top my love for Station Eleven, but Sea of Tranquility has added such depth to my appreciation of it.
While Sea of Tranquility is self-referential and directly uses characters from The Glass Hotel, you don’t have to have read that novel to enjoy this one. I haven’t read The Glass Hotel yet, and I never felt like I was missing anything.
Rating: one hundred stars. top tier fiction.
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