‘Sea of Tranquility’ spans 500 years of pandemic life
As of May 2022, 1 million people in the United States have died from COVID19. That translates to approximately 35,000 people per month over the past two and a half years. This grim statistic may be one compelling reason why Emily St. John Mandel’s “Sea of Tranquility” is resonating so strongly with readers, who are snapping up the hardback edition of this book.
“Sea of Tranquility” is not devoted to an examination of COVID. Rather, pandemics are the background; they have become part of the fabric of life. The book spans a 500year time frame, from roughly 1900 through 2400, with most of the events occurring on worlds (the Earth, the Moon, the Far Colonies) where pandemics recur unpredictably, yet with predictable frequency. You live through one, if you’re lucky, have some years of tranquility, and then are engulfed by the next onslaught of plague. It’s the new normal, but it never quite becomes commonplace; disease sneaks up and grabs you or your loved ones just when you think it’s safe to return to a long-distant past existence where masks are for Halloween and gatherings of friends and family occur frequently, in living rooms and bowling alleys.
“SEA OF TRANQUILITY”
By Emily St. John Mandel Alfred Knopf ($25)
The opening pages of the book are devoted to Edwin St. John St. Andrew, who involuntarily travels from England to the Canadian wilderness in 1912, disenfranchised by his upper-class family after he questions the British Empire’s appetite for devouring all other countries on Earth in general, and India in particular. In the wilds of British Columbia, surrounded by virgin forest, he is inexplicably overcome by what he can only believe is a visual and auditory hallucination; either that or madness.
But St. Andrew is not the only person who experiences this phenomenon. In 2020, a violinist composes a piece of music based upon his sister’s strange video of an anomaly she recorded while wandering through the British Columbian woods several years earlier. The video sounds and looks a lot like St. Andrew’s description of what he thought he saw and heard.
And so it goes, traveling down through 500 years of humanity. Until, eventually, in 2401 there exists the technology and means to investigate these strange occurrences and form a scientifically accurate hypotheses about what is occurring and why. The investigation will jump through time and space but, in 2401, that is now possible.
“Sea of Tranquility” is a slim book, only 250 pages. There are not scores of characters; not dozens of plot-lines. It should be an easy book in which to remember who, what, where and why. But this Sea spans 500 years in no particular order, and even the main characters get lost in the shuffle of centuries.
The author knows what she has created. One of her characters is an author who has just completed a sci-fi fantasy book that jumps through time, place and space. At a book-signing event, a reader tells the author, “I was so confused by your book … There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t, ultimately. The book just ended.”
Thankfully, “Sea of Tranquility” doesn’t just end without any connections made. But the story does suffer from this ubiquitous, 21st-century method of crafting nonchronological literary fiction.
Had the author not started in the middle of the story, and withheld the central, cohesion-building character until halfway through the book, readers would have a much better understanding of what was occurring, and how, and why. As written, a good portion of the story’s mystery, drama and tension is created simply by dispensing with chronology.
Another problem with jumping through time and events is that the characters themselves often disappear into the spacetime confusion. Just when readers begin to engage with a character, they’re gone for 50 or 150 pages. When the character is eventually resurrected, the reader could feel so far removed from their story that it could be difficult to remember who they are or why they even mattered.
“Sea of Tranquility” is timely. It reflects our present reality of reevaluating our lives in the face of current and possibly future pandemics.
It is humane, suffused with insights into how ordinary people think and feel when confronted with disorienting or disparate experiences. Two people discuss their shared childhood neighborhood, for example. For one, it was a catastrophe, an enormous downward shift from glittery penthouses to decrepit shanties in the darkest, dreariest Moon colony. For the other, it was a specifically chosen, beloved home because, as his mother said, “at least this place has some character to it, not like those sterile colonies with the fake lighting.”
But for some readers, because “Sea of Tranquility” is also so jump-around trendy, it may not be the excellent read it could have been.