Book Review: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel entered the spotlight in 2014 with Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic tale set in the aftermath of a pandemic that killed most of the world’s population. This same spotlight burned much, much brighter in 2020, when an actual pandemic showed up, launching Station Eleven past the million-sold mark and prompted an HBO miniseries.

Station Eleven

It’s hard to imagine how anyone might process this chain of events. While most authors dream of critical and commercial success, it feels Faustian when this success articulates with the deaths of millions of people. Sea of Tranquility seems to be Mandel’s way of grappling with this irony, and the greater absurdity of fate. Her exploration relies upon time travel to connect four loosely connected narratives spanning 500 years.

The story begins in 1912 with Edwin, a young English aristocrat in exile, who has a bizarre encounter with a flash of darkness in a forest. These opening scenes are immersive and suspenseful, yet also beautiful, as though painted through Edwin’s artistic gaze in Mandel’s crystal, efficient prose.

From the forest we jump forward to 2020 New York, where Mirella, a young woman almost as lost as Edwin, learns of an old friend’s death, and witnesses video footage of a strange phenomenon in a forest highly reminiscent of the event in 1912. With these threads we begin to understand that the narratives are linked, and this intrigue builds and solidifies as the pages turn.

The third narrative introduces us to Olive Llewelyn in 2203. This character contains the most emotional depth, likely because she is the most autobiographical. Olive is a bestselling author of a pandemic novel on a book tour that is about to be cut short by a real-life pandemic.

Sound familiar?

Set aside the hovercraft, bubble colonies on the moon, etc., and you’ve basically got Emily St. John Mandel. I don’t know her personally, of course, but I imagine Mandel is much like Olive — intelligent, funny in a dry way, grateful but jaded, and torn between professional and personal time. 

Emily St. John Mandel

The fourth and final narrative, set two hundred years later, offers a juxtaposed individual who shall go unnamed for the sake of sparing spoilers. This was my personal favorite character — a naive, good-hearted, incompetent soul who goes searching for a crack in the space-time continuum. In short: Fun!

Over 255 lightly printed pages, the book takes four great leaps from 1912 to 2401 and back again. It’s a neat, pyramidal structure akin to Cloud Atlas, although its execution, in comparison, leads me to believe that 500 well-inked pages, as David Mitchell created, may be necessary to convincingly pull off a story that spans 500 years. Although Mandel also has the narrative skill to draw us into each of her worlds (and, like Mitchell, a penchant for referencing her other books), some sections were uneven and sketched.

In one paragraph, for example, Mandel ticks off five years of a character’s life. They are allegedly spent undergoing a rigorous education in how to use a futuristic technology, but in the next paragraph, after graduation, the same character is asking basic questions that must have been discussed many times throughout his schooling.

Some of the science-fiction feels similarly stamped onto the page. While Cloud Atlas is colored with unique futuristic worlds, Mandel seems to have taken inspiration from the 1950s slicks, complete with bubble colonies on the moon, hovercraft, and airships.

The bubble colonies become more compelling and realistic with time, but human society and language, sadly, make little progress over the upcoming 400 years. 

In the year 2203, for instance, journalists are still asking a woman author why she isn’t at home looking after her young child. At first I thought this was a cynical take on the slow progress of women’s rights (fair enough), but then, in the year ~2100 (just 80 years from now), we learn that the president of China is a woman, which suggests a far more optimistic social trajectory (especially because the Politburo currently has exactly zero female members). I imagine the future will probably land somewhere in between. 

Sea of Tranquility

This is ultimately where Sea of Tranquility left me — somewhere in between. It is either a literary novel wearing the cloak of science-fiction, or a science-fiction novel focused more on emotional depth than internal consistency. I believe Mandel has the power to unite the best of both worlds with her next one. In the meantime, this is an enjoyable, fast read that I’m sure will hit the mark for anyone who fell in love with Mandel after reading Station Eleven.

PS: The book cover is absolutely beautiful — one of my all-time favorites. Kudos to Stephen Coll for the photograph and Abby Weintraub for the jacket design.

PPS: Thanks for reading my Sea of Tranquility book review. I wrote this post for my shameless SEO-driven book-marketing strategy.