New Post-Apocalypse Novel from Emily St. John Mandel

 

 

SEA OF TRANQUILITY (2022)

By Emily St. John Mandel

Knopf, 226 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Readers of Emily St. John Mandel know that she has an affinity for considering a post- apocalyptic world. Sea of Tranquility is such a book, one with a bit time travel thrown in to heighten our interest.

 

Her tale is told in eight parts and takes place in various years during the 20th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries. A book from 20th century novelist Olive Llewellyn contains this quote: "No star burns forever." Many of her future readers assume it’s original to her last novel Marienbad. Nope; it’s from Shakespeare. This is one of several sly jokes Mandel sneaks into her text. Last Year in Marienbad was an avant-garde 1961 film directed by Alan Resnais and involves a situation that might or might not have occurred. The film considers whether a man and a woman have or have not conducted an affair; in Mandel’s novel different sorts of uncertainties prevail.

 

Is something amiss with the timeline? People in various places and time periods hear a whooshing sound, strains of a melody played on a violin, and report flashing lights punctuated by darkness and the sensation of viewing a quick video clip. The troubled star, though, is Earth and most people in the future live in various off-world colonies, first on the Moon then further out in the solar system. There are still humans on Earth, but it was ravaged by a 21^st century pandemic. Mandel never names the plague, but given that parallels are drawn to the 1918 Spanish flu, I think we know Mendel's target. Add a subplot about Ponzi-like financial malfeasance and you can probably reconstruct Ms. Mandel's worldview. The book’s title is another small joke. You might remember that, in 1969, the Sea of Tranquility was the location on the Moon where Neil Armstrong became the first human to tread upon its surface.

 

Is there really something wrong with the timeline? Well, the best way to find out is to send Time Institute volunteers into the past and future to investigate and report back on the anomaly. This comes with built-in danger, namely the butterfly effect, a scenario that postulates that even a small change in an environment can have chaotic, even disastrous, repercussions. Or maybe not. In a chapter titled "Last Book Tour on Earth," for instance, Llewellyn has traveled from Moon Colony Two to Earth to talk about her new novel, Marienbad. Unbeknownst to her, she will die three days later. What would happen if she didn't? Would it really matter?

 

At the heart of Sea of Tranquility is Gaspery Jacque-Roberts, a perpetual n’er do well. He worries his sister Zoey, a serious Time Institute researcher. Will Gaspery find himself as a time traveler? Yes, but probably not in ways you would imagine.

 

Mandel’s novel takes us off-world, but also to Ohio, Oklahoma City, and Vancouver Island. As Olive posed it in Marienbad, "What if it always is the end of the world?" More ominously, what if the world has ended and those who perceive themselves as living beings are trapped in a simulation of some sort?

 

That last idea is hardly unique to Mandel. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. readers might recall that he placed the character of Dwayne Hoover in such a scenario in Breakfast of Champions. Hoover concludes he is the only sentient being on the planet with free will and that he is merely an experiment on the port of the Creator to see how he will respond to various stimuli.

 

Hoover was crazy. Is that what’s going on in Sea of Tranquility? Far be from me to reveal the answer. If you like good sci-fi, excellent writing, high fantasy value, and can tolerate some slippage upon well-traveled futuristic turf, this is the book for you.

 

Rob Weir