Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel review – time-travel drama

acquired an aura of creepy prophecy as Covid-19 made us all fluent in the language of pandemics. What made the book’s apparent prescience doubly strange is that one of Mandel’s hallmarks as a writer is noticing the echoes between apparently chance events: the links between distant characters, motifs from art recurring in life, and the historical echoes of long-separated incidents. The coincidence of a book meaningfully anticipating a current predicament could be one of her novelistic devices.

A few dozen pages on, the scene suddenly shifts and we are plunged into the present. At a concert in New York a composer is playing an old piece of video that seems to show a version of whatever Edwin found in the forest. Now that we’re invested in the mystery, the weirdness can really begin. There are two subsequent interwoven storylines. One unfolds in the 23rd century, where a writer called Olive Llewellyn, who was born and raised on a lunar colony, is visiting Earth on a book tour.

This summary doesn’t do the book justice, but further exposition would, I think, spoil the novel for readers. Hugely ambitious in scope, yet also intimate and written with a graceful and beguiling fluency, Sea of Tranquility even invokes minor characters from another of Mandel’s previous novels,, as it gradually shows how all these incidents and people are part of one vast and fractured world.

One of the quietest yet most compelling sections concerns Olive’s experiences on her book tour. As she promotes her novel, Marienbad, about a pandemic, a real pandemic is devastating the 23rd-century Earth and its lunar colonies. “I’ve never been interested in autofiction,” Olive tells one of her interviewers. This feels like a wink at the reader.

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