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A review by richardrbecker
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
4.0
There is a poetic fluidity to Emily St. John Mandel's speculative time travel novel, Sea of Tranquility, as the author pours the briefest of chapters a few drops at a time until the story becomes an increasingly steady stream of prose. Later, it will end as it finishes, with shorter and shorter scenes that provide a precisely measured resolution.
While there is a simplicity to the plot as a whole, St. John Mandel makes up for it with some exquisitely painted details about future moon colonies that feel surprisingly plausible. Yet, the story doesn't begin there. It begins in 1912 after an experience in a Vancouver forest leaves one of the characters shaken and readers with a sense of anticipation for what will become a time-travel mystery.
St. John Mandel follows several different protagonist storylines that are ultimately tied together by time-traveling detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, who is supposed to be investigating a timeline anomaly. The author lightly raises subjects for deeper thought: whether we live in a place with a tangible reality or a simulation, if timelines can heal themselves after being meddled with, and how we cope with environmental disasters and pandemics, while also touching on a myriad of other grounded topics.
Among my favorite observations comes from some of her characters addressing our obsession with extinction. "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 this feels even more significant, given that the book is about time travel, and you ultimately wonder if there really is an end anyway.
Ultimately, the Sea of Tranquility is a splendid book that allows the plot to work harder than the characters who tell the story. But that's all right because the ending should leave most utterly satisfied all the same.
While there is a simplicity to the plot as a whole, St. John Mandel makes up for it with some exquisitely painted details about future moon colonies that feel surprisingly plausible. Yet, the story doesn't begin there. It begins in 1912 after an experience in a Vancouver forest leaves one of the characters shaken and readers with a sense of anticipation for what will become a time-travel mystery.
St. John Mandel follows several different protagonist storylines that are ultimately tied together by time-traveling detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, who is supposed to be investigating a timeline anomaly. The author lightly raises subjects for deeper thought: whether we live in a place with a tangible reality or a simulation, if timelines can heal themselves after being meddled with, and how we cope with environmental disasters and pandemics, while also touching on a myriad of other grounded topics.
Among my favorite observations comes from some of her characters addressing our obsession with extinction. "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 this feels even more significant, given that the book is about time travel, and you ultimately wonder if there really is an end anyway.
Ultimately, the Sea of Tranquility is a splendid book that allows the plot to work harder than the characters who tell the story. But that's all right because the ending should leave most utterly satisfied all the same.