The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century. Their flag was still there, in the distance, a fragile little statue on the windless surface.
Sea of Tranquility is my favourite Emily St. John Mandel so far: more playful than her previous novels, I found this to be meaningful and thought-provoking while absolutely capturing the experience of living through the Covid-19 pandemic. Some characters from The Glass Hotel make a return and, metafictionally, Station Eleven is referenced (as a stand-in for Mandel herself is asked what it’s like to see her pandemic novel, Marienbad, resurge in popularity during an actual pandemic), and the whole feels like a David Mitchellesque über-project; Mandel is on her way to creating an epic here. On its own, this volume might feel a bit slight (it only takes a few hours to read), but for what it adds to the overall project, and for what it captures of our times, I am rounding up to five stars; it’s a perfect little gem. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.) The following might be slightly spoilery as I attempt to note enough detail for my own future use (but not more spoilery than the publisher’s blurb).
He steps forward — into a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound — When he returns to his senses he’s on the beach, kneeling on hard stones, vomiting.
The novel begins in 1912 and eighteen-year-old Edwin St. John St. Andrew is exiled to Canada after, mystifyingly, voicing some audacious opinions at his parents’ dinner party (Including: evidence suggests the people of India feel rather more oppressed by the British than by the heat; and: the family’s remote forefather William the Conqueror had been naught but “the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider”), and after hopscotching ever-westward through Halifax, Saskatchewan, Victoria, and finally landing in a small community further up the coast of Vancouver Island, Edwin has an out-of-body-to-blackout experience in the forest that leaves him spooked and shaken. An oddly-accented man posing as a priest wants to question Edwin, but the stranger runs away when the real priest turns up.
The next chapter jumps ahead to the year 2020 and a composer is showing an audience the strange video that his sister (Vincent Alkaitis from The Glass Hotel) once took of a forest clearing near her hometown on Vancouver Island; the same clearing that Edwin had entered, the video cutting to black after the same out-of-time violins-and-hydraulics sound experience that Edwin had encountered. In the audience that night and wanting to speak with the composer, Paul, are: a fawning fanboy in oversized clothing, Mirella — an old friend of Vincent’s, hoping to track her down — and a man with a strange accent who, incredibly, may have crossed paths with Mirella when she was a child. But why hasn’t he aged since then?
We knew it was coming. We knew it was coming and we prepared accordingly, or at least that’s what we told our children — and ourselves — in the decades that followed. We knew it was coming but we didn’t quite believe it, so we prepared in low-key, unobtrusive ways — “Why do we have a whole shelf of canned fish?” Willis asked his husband, who said something vague about emergency preparedness — Because of that ancient horror, too embarrassingly irrational to be articulated aloud: if you say the name of the thing you fear, might you attract that thing’s attention? This is difficult to admit, but in those early weeks we were vague about our fears because saying the word pandemic might bend the pandemic toward us.
Jump ahead to 2203 and author Olive Llewellyn is visiting Earth from her moon-based colony on a book tour for the earliest of her three novels — receiving renewed interest in light of its imminent film adaptation — and as she fields the same boring and sexist questions worldwide, all while missing her husband and daughter back home, she is aware of the mounting irony of promoting a pandemic novel (about a “scientifically implausible flu”) while the news warns of a mysterious new virus. And who is the interviewer with the odd accent who wants to know about that one strange scene in her novel — a vision of trees accompanied by the strain of violins and launching airships — set in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal?
No star burns forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.
The next chapter is set in 2401, and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts (named for a character in his mother’s favourite book, Marienbad) is a listless thirty-something, drifting through life in a moon colony after the breakup of his marriage and the recent death of his mother. When his sister — a brilliant scientist who works for the secretive Time Institute — shows him an old video that she finds disturbing (the same video of the trees overlaid with violins and airships that Vincent had recorded as a teenager), Gaspery is intrigued to distraction. What he and his sister can’t quite work out from their vantage in the high-tech future is: Has this video captured a glitch in simulated reality? Is it an anomaly created by a paradox-causing time traveller? Is it a supernatural event meant to warn of the End of Days? What if time travel is real and Gaspery can train to go back in time and interview the key players related to the video? Better work on that accent; it’s bad enough that Gaspery hasn’t been taught cursive or Shakespeare.
HR is bureaucracy. As is the Time Institute. The premier research university on the moon, possessor of the only working time machine in existence, intimately enmeshed in government and in law enforcement. Even one of those things would imply a formidable bureaucracy, don’t you think? What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self- protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.
There’s so much in here about the nature of reality — even Mirella works at a tile store that specialises in simulated stone that’s indistinguishable from the real thing; I think it's implied that this same simulated stone is eventually used to build the moon colonies — and those domed colonies, with their projected Earth skies and artificial weather systems, are meant to simulate life on Earth. If we are living in the Matrix, as some of the characters muse, and we believe the simulation, then the simulation is reality. But all worlds — civilisations, planets, computer-generated simulations — eventually run down to their natural ends; even Edwin grows sympathetic to his mother’s grief over the ending of the Raj system in India which she had grown up under. So can the Time Institute be blamed for being ruthless in its aim to protect the timeline from glitches? This is the question at the heart of the plot.
As a stand-in for Mandel, I loved the character of Olive Llewellyn as she patiently fields questions on her book tour (Did that woman just say it was kind of Olive’s husband to care for their child while she was on tour? Is this what Mandel faced on her last book tour as Covid began?) I appreciated Olive’s answer about why people like dystopian fiction:
I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.
And I loved that through Olive, Mandel was able to explain why the book she wrote during the pandemic lockdown was a departure into sci-fi:
“I don’t mean to be melodramatic, and I know it’s like this in a lot of places now, but there’s just, there is so much death. There’s death all around us. I don’t want to write about anything real.” The journalist was quiet. “And I know it’s like this for everyone else too. I know how fortunate I am. I know how much worse it could be. I’m not complaining. But my parents live on Earth, and I don’t know if . . .” She had to stop and take a breath to compose herself. “I don’t know when I’ll see them again.”
Mandel was in this uniquely ironic position of having her pandemic-themed novel surge in popularity during a pandemic (Olive drily notes that she doesn’t bring her royalty reports to meetings when an interviewer wants to know specifics about sales numbers), and this book that she wrote during the lockdown not only describes what that experience was like for her as a writer (Olive hoards supplies, feels restless and confined, and needs to juggle home-schooling and work like so many other parents) but she also smoothly interprets and inserts this experience into her larger project. This isn’t reportage, this is art; and I loved it.
