Sea of Tranquility
Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel
255 pages
Knopf, April 2022
“....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.”
Nobody writes a story with intersecting stories over long periods of time like Emily St. John Mandel. Sea of Tranquility is no different. In this book, stories of a man off a small Vancouver Island in 1912, a writer living on a moon colony but going on an Earth tour for her pandemic novel in 2203, a detective in the days before Covid-19, and a violinist at an Oklahoma City airport in the late 2100′s all collide in a way that is truly mind-boggling.
When Edwin St. Andrew experiences a glitch in his mind near a maple tree in Caiette Canada in 1912, it starts the story of others who’ve experienced the same glitch throughout history. Gaspery Roberts, a hotel detective in the year 2401 struggles to find a historic answer.
No spoilers, but the ending of this book literally left me gasping out loud. It’s not so much that there’s a twist ending, but that it’s an ending that feels like a twist, but in reality has been foreshadowed all along. It’s such a difficult thing for an author to craft, but it’s handled perfectly by St. John Mandel.
Sea of Tranquility is sure to be a modern classic and holds up every bit as well as Station Eleven, the work St. John Mandel is best know for.