”Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel - review

 “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel:

I really liked this novel. I did like her first one, Station Eleven, too. But with this one she convinced me and won me over.

Maybe after two wartime novels and a rather bleak depiction of a corrupt Indian society, still in the afterglow of a pandemic and the start of the horrible war in the Ukraine I needed a respite from the news and get my mind off things for a while, flee reality, go to some place (admittedly still dystopian in flavour), away from harsh reality and loose myself in a nice adventure story and philosophical ponderings on issues like time and time travel, the meaning and quality of life or the concept of life lived in a simulation.

It is speculative fiction but it is good at it. All starts as a common detective story and by half-way through the book we find ourselves entangled in a tale of alternate, strangely intercepting and mutually repercussing time periods and live experiences which all in the end fit together and turn back on their beginning. A very clever tale, beautifully rendered and satisfyingly resolved in the end.

On the front it is a Science Fiction tale, in total it is much more. The author uses time travel and other sci-fi themes to ask age-old questions about how we create meaning and attach it to life.

As in her previous novel Station Eleven different time zones are generated which connect, intercept and affect each other in unforeseen ways. The past isn’t just prologue, it’s the present and future, too. There are notes and quotes which repeat across time, much like musical notes in a fugue.

Sea of Tranquility follows four separate storylines and opens on a young British man, Edwin St. John St. Andrew who seeks himself in a faraway land, but does not succeed. In 1912 he travels to Canada and there, on a small island in a dark forest he experiences a strange suite of sensory, inexplicable events, the anomaly as we later learn, and meets a man named Gaspery Roberts. 

Gaspary Roberts himself comes from the far future and is a time traveler from the year 2401. He’s investigating a cosmic anomaly, a space-time rupture or, as his physicist sister Zoey explains it, a “file corruption,” which may provide evidence that the universe is a simulation. 

On his course to unravel this anomaly he meets various people in different time zones, a teenager video-artist named Vincent, an aging violinist who performs in an airship terminal and a novelist who writes about pandemics. They all are connected unknowingly by and to that anomaly.

The novel is a pleasure to read. The characters are lively and memorable. The prose is eloquent, the pace fast, the narrative captivating and surprising. This is a book which uses sci-fi themes but is more interested in the psychology of its characters than in building or depicting strange future worlds. 

 At the end of the book, one character says, pondering the question what a life lived in a simulation would be: ”If definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what? A life lived in simulation is still a life.” Famous American poet Wallace Stevens once said that reality is ”things as they are”. This seems to be the main theme: That artifice not necessarily shuts out meaning. 

One of the most resonating sentences with me in that book was its last one: 

”I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately, about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.“

It brings to mind another great poet, T. S. Eliot, and the beginning of his long passage in The Four Quartets:

… “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, …

… Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been is an abstraction

Remaining a perpetual possibility

Only in a world of speculation.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

                                   But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know. .... "

A truly enjoyable book. Hugely satisfying both as an adventure tale and an intellectual play on time, life and metaphysics.

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