Emily St. John Mandel’s sixth novel is a fascinating exploration of time and space, that takes place across three separate centuries. Sea of Tranquility begins like a traditional historical fiction: in the year 1812, the young British aristocrat Edwin St. John St. Andrew is banished to the wilds of Canada after upsetting his parents with political banter and hijinks. One day he journeys into the woods and experiences a deeply unsettling phenomenon, after he walks under a maple tree and all of the sudden the world goes totally black and Edwin hears strange and unfamiliar noises. Edwin’s experience with this mysterious sort of void becomes the crucial link between the three narrative strands that comprise this novel.
Mandel then jumps into the 23rd century to the novelist Olive Llewellyn, who has left her home on the moon colonies to travel to earth for a book tour surrounding her blockbuster novel about a global pandemic. Readers ears may perk up at that detail—Mandel herself gained a great deal of attention for her 2014 novel Station Eleven, about a fictional pandemic that exploded in popularity in 2020 for its prescience. Olive travels from city to city, answering uninspiring interview questions and being subjected to the lofty expectations of her readers. While Olive’s story offers fascinating insight into the life of an author, the real intrigue comes from a single passage in her novel—in which a character encounters a void not unlike the one that Edwin St. John St. Andrew happened upon in the Canadian wilderness.
The novel’s strands begin to come together in its third section, which takes place in the 25th century on the same moon colony that Olive once resided in, and centers around the mysterious Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, who is employed as a detective with the “Time Institute”. Gaspery is tasked with investigating possible breaks in the time continuum, which he believes to be these mysterious voids that Olive and Edwin describe. The third portion of the novel is where Mandel really begins to reveal the complex philosophical implications of her narrative, and builds to an intricately plotted and sublime conclusion.
What I love most about Mandel’s work is her ability to conjure dreamlike and mysterious universes that feel both real and a bit surreal, and to explicate the deeply human with complex narrative devices. The sci-fi elements of the novel never stray into a gimmicky or trite territory, as Mandel is constantly reminding readers of the humans piloting the machines. Sea of Tranquility both celebrates the innate beauty of our world, but also grapples with our fractured relationship with it.
Readers of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantastic speculative fiction will no doubt notice a similar human element in this novel that defies conventions of the genre. While Sea of Tranquility features some hallmarks of the sci-fi genre, including time travel and futuristic technology, the novel clearly has more on its mind than meets the eye. This is an arresting and singular piece of fiction that proves Mandel’s incisive eye and lyrical gift have in no way been weakened by the spotlight. Sea of Tranquility is a fantastic effort, and readers can only hope that she’s not quite done with these characters and themes yet.