Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Sea of Tranquility

2022 Goodreads Choice Science Fiction Novel of the Year but also a major highlight of my literary fiction year.

"Is this the Promised End" – Shakespeare, King Lear

"August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes there had to be one where there had been no pandemic …… or one where they’d been a pandemic, but the virus had a subtly different genetic structure, some miniscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted" - Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven

“hallucinations is the wrong word, it’s more like a creeping sense of unreality, a sense of collapsing borders, reality seeping into the counterlife and the counterlife seeping into memory" – Emily St John Mandel, Glass Hotel

Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 fourth novel – the post apocalyptical “Station Eleven” (dealing with the aftermath of a deadly swine flu pandemic and beginning with an actor dying from a heart attack in a production of King Lear) was already something of a classic (nominated for various literary prizes in US, UK and Canada and winner of the 2015 Arthur C Clarke Science Fiction award) before enjoying a huge resurgence (for obvious reasons) in 2020 (and getting its own HBO mini series in December 2021).

I came to the book in 2020 when I read it back to back with her fifth novel “The Glass Hotel” – read together (and I think it is by far the best way to read them) the novels were simply brilliantly. “The Glass Hotel” in particular, alongside its exploration of capitalism and white collar crime with its pseudo-Madoff plot, is really an exploration of ideas such as shadow worlds, ghost worlds, lost worlds, counter-factual narratives, doubleness, parallel realities: and what really makes the books work so well together is that “The Glass Hotel” is effectively the parallel universe mentioned in the “Station Eleven” quote where the devastating pandemic does not happen, but the global financial crisis does, but with many other links between the novels.

See my review here https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This her sixth novel, to be published later in 2022, is I think best scene as a companion novel to both of its predecessors.

It is set in the “parallel universe” of “The Glass Hotel” – one which at least until 2021 mirrors our own (no Georgia Flu, but a Financial Crisis including the Alkaitis Ponzi scheme and its repercussions) and with explicitly repeating characters (particularly the two wives – Mirella and Vincent – their post crash encounter in “The Glass Hotel” where Mirella refuses to acknowledge Vincent is replayed here from Mirella’s viewpoint).

But it also features a character - Olive Llewelyn – who is an author of a novel “Marienbad” (I assume as a nod by Mandel to the film “Last Year at Marienbad” which per Wikipedia is “famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which time and space are fluid, with no certainty over what is happening to the characters, what they are remembering, or what they are imagining”). For Olive after “three books that no one noticed” her fourth novel pandemic-based dystopian novel (not difficult to see the parallels) suddenly made her feel that she had slipped into a “parallel world ………. a bizarre upside down world where people actually read my work”. That novel (which in one key moment has a character rehearsing a line from King Lear) is now being made into a film so she is touring to promote it – later her book sales take off even more during an actual pandemic. In further self-referentiality Olive, whose first main section of the novel is set during a book tour and the second during a lockdown virtual book tour answers questions about what it is like to talk about a book about a pandemic in a pandemic, how many additional sales she has gathered post pandemic, admits the “scientifically implausible flu” in her novel and is critiqued for the “anticlimactical” death scene of the prophet (all of course explicit allusions to “Station Eleven”).

Now Olive’s book tour takes place in 2203 and while based on the Earth begins from her home on a lunar Colony – because this book even more firmly than “Station Eleven” is a science fiction book, with I have to say a plot that reminds me of Harry Harrison and Dr Who.

The book has a Cloud Atlas type nested structure – and of course it is increasingly clear that Mandel shares much of the same multiverse approach as Mitchell – while perhaps I think exploring the idea with more depth and empathy.

The first part of the book takes place in 1912 – an 18 year old third son Edwin St Andrew St John of a rich and titled English family is exiled (after some uncomfortable remarks about the Empire and his mother’s beloved and much mourned Raj – the first sign incidentally that this is a book about lost and mourned for worlds) to Canada (as a “Remittance man”) where he ends on the Island of Caiette (later of course home of The Glass Hotel – actually called Hotel Caiette). There he has a weird experience in a forest (involving a violin and an inexplicable loud noise) shortly after meeting a mysterious priest – Roberts - with a strange accent.

The action then moves to 2020 – as Mirelle waits outside a concert by Paul (to see what she can find out about his sister Vincent) they are joined by an odd man – Gaspery Roberts – who is keen to find out about a glitch in one of Vincent’s forest-based videos which Paul has set to violin music, and who Mirelle recognises from a traumatic childhood incident.

We then move forwards to Olive’s book tour – and an encounter with a journalist who shares a name Gaspery-Jacques – with a character in Marienbad and who is keen to understand about an odd scene in her novel (which seems to have echoes of Edwin’s trauma and Paul/Vincent’s video – a man playing violin in an airship terminal and a sudden juxtaposition of a forest) – one she admits may have biographical elements.

And then in 2401 we meet Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a hotel detective from the Night City on the moon, who is co-opted into a programme to investigate anomalies in time and we return to each of the previous stories in turn.

Interestingly for me this part contains an interesting reflection on bureaucracy “bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-preservation” which had strong (if controversial) resonances for me of some of the ways in which the UK COVID response has played out. I do not think this was in any way intended but (just as with “Glass House” and “Station Eleven”) it is the strength, universality and topicality of Mandel’s writing that it sets of such unintended resonances.

Olive’s sections start with her literary musings on dystopia and pandemic literature (why one would write it, why readers are attracted to it) in ways which beautifully explore why “Station Eleven” has proved so popular. Later we get extremely resonant reflections on a pandemic – how the world of home can feel like a lost world when one is travelling for work, but how the world of work and travel can feel like a lost world in lockdown.

Overall this is a book which in a science fiction sense moves beyond parallel worlds to explore time travel and the nature of reality against simulation, but which really in an thematic sense (and like all of Mandel’s trilogy of recent books) is much more of a both a love letter to and requiem for our current world, an exploration of belonging, loss, of technology, of relationships, of what provides ultimate fulfillment and where value is ultimately found.

As a standalone novel I am not fully sure how this works (and I do not think it matches the complexity of "Station Eleven") – as part of a body of work it is brilliant.

My thanks to Picador, Pan Macmillan for an ARC via NetGalley