As I write this review, SEA OF TRANQUILITY is a finalist in the 2022 Goodreads Awards. In a fractured but immediately readable, time travel novel moving from 1912 to the future of extraplanetary colonies, Olive Llewellyn, an author who has written about a pandemic, is on an extended book tour of North America. A magazine correspondent, Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, knows more about her than seems logical. Olive and Gaspery both grew up in a moon colony but their stories are quite different.
The reader begins by seeing the shores of North America, depopulated through a newly arrived smallpox epidemic. Next, we visit Edwin St. John St. Andrew, a lengthy name for the second son of a titled family. Like many men not due to inherit, he was packed off to Canada on remittance. While exploring Vancouver Island in 1912, Edwin, a dreamer rather than a doer, experiences a strange phenomenon. In a future time, this is being examined as a temporal anomaly that affects a pandemic-stricken population in an airship terminal. Following this glitch does not seem worth the vast energy resources required to travel through time, but a bureaucracy has nothing better to spend money on, so Gaspery is sent to investigate. However, we know from all the time travel stories that merely by observing something we change it. The different strands are revisited throughout the tale.
An interesting note for fans of Emily St. John Mandel's previous book, THE GLASS HOTEL: the couple involved with the Ponzi scheme is included in this novel. If you enjoyed THE GLASS HOTEL, you will be interested to see more of the lives of the characters.
Each reader will take a different message from SEA OF TRANQUILITY, a dystopian and concerning tale of colonies in the past, present, and future. To me, the multiple story strands reminded me at once of Maja Lunde’s THE LAST WILD HORSES, except that there isn’t a strand about protecting nature. I like the descriptions of the organised lunar cities, and the determination to spread life further from Earth to avoid some ultimate disaster. Emily St. John Mandel may have been making a point that Covid-19 is no different from the New World smallpox outbreak, and we can’t expect this will be the end of all pandemics, any more than the war not too far in the future from Edwin’s Vancouver scene could ever have been the war to end all wars. Time travel is just the wrapping on the package. But it’s a shiny wrapping, neatly tied in a bow.
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.
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