There are a great many novels out there that explore the idea of a multiverse, or at least the idea of alternate realities or time shifts, and which do so in a way that is often imaginative, compelling and fantastically immersively readable.
The new novel by Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven, The Glass Hotel), Sea of Tranquility, possesses all of these laudable attributes, bringing together a diverse group of captivating characters who all share one strangely beguiling experience in common, but it goes that little bit further, beautifully and poignantly driving home the idea of interconnectedness, not simply across space but time too.
Exploring the way in which life is an endless series of possibilities and we rise and fall on the strength of how we respond to them, Sea of Tranquility is that rare and wondrous thing – a novel that is at once brilliantly original in its vision and depth but which is also intimately emotionally accessible.
It deftly and movingly balances some truly extraordinary events with a vibrancy of emotionality that speaks to the way in which even the most gobsmackingly epic of events all come with a groundedly human aspect, managing to be both propulsively action-packed but doing so in a way that is thoughtful, nuanced and pleasingly character-rich.
“—into a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. He [Edwin] has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound—” (P. 29)
That has, of course, always been a gift of St. John Mandel’s a writer who can take multiple narrative threads, some outrageously out there while others are meditatively quiet, unspooling with a whisper-quiet touch, and it is on full breathtaking display in Sea of Tranquility, a novel in which quite a bit happens but always in a way that feels like it’s well within grasp and eminently relatable.
That’s quite a feat when you consider that this book has some truly unusual elements to it.
Moving from 1912 through to the start of the 25th century when humanity is spread across the solar system, Sea of Tranquility centres on a diverse group of characters who all come to have one curiously strange thing about them – they have all found themselves transported to a rare and mystical cathedral-like space among the trees by piercingly beautiful violin playing that makes such an impact on them that they are never the same again.
Eighteen-year-old Edwin St. John, St. Andrew, who is wonderfully introduced by Mandel as “hauling the weight of his double-sainted name across the Atlantic by steamship”, hears it at the forested tip of Vancouver Island and he is never quite the same again, shaken to the core in a way he can never fully explain.
Olive Llewellyn could not be more different, a successful writer who is on an expansive book tour of Earth from her home in one of the moon colonies when pandemic begins to stalk her and many others, an unsettling time in which she meets a man who challenges her to reconsider some critical life choices.
She has also heard the siren song of the violin playing and written in into her latest book, a passage that seems impossibly fantastical to readers, with its tale of beautiful music summoning a forest to grow in the middle of an airship terminal.
Everyone assumes it to be entirely fictitious of course but what if it’s not and realty is a good deal more fluid and accidentally connective than she or any of her readers ever imagined?
Other people are drawn into this mystical web of connection including a time detective from the future, Gaspery-Jacque Roberts, whose names crops in Llewellyn’s book some two centuries or so earlier, and his childhood friend Talia who proves to be instrumental in helping him connect some truly incredible dots, the exact nature of which defy understanding even as they possess a holdable, feelable humanity that eventually makes sense even as it dazzles with its impossibility.
At every stage of Sea of Tranquility‘s extraordinary tale, St. John Mandel keeps the focus purely on the people who are either caught in truly bewildering and enchantingly overwhelming events or committed to solving why they are occurring at all, and it is this raw, truthfully insightful humanity that makes this lavishly enticing novel such a pleasure to read.
As St. John Mandel draws the myriad threads together, it becomes apparent that while the strange things experienced by the various characters may seem inexplicable and damn near magical at times, they are heart driven by a need by people to connect, to feel and to know each other, even when they don’t occupy the same space and time, or at least, not knowingly, anyway.
“In the departure lounge, Olive found a corner far from anyone else and took out her device. There was no new news of the pandemic, but she ordered three months’ worth of pharmaceutical supplies, then bottled water for good measure, then a mountain of new toys for Sylvie. By the time she boarded the flight she had spent a small fortune and felt mildly insane.” (P. 175)
As you find yourself drawn deeper into the lives of characters who captivate you with their difference and yet their very relatable accessibility, you find yourself caught up in both a whodunnit or whadunnit of sorts, with clues connected together like Poirot on a sleuthing mission, and enchanted by the lives of people who are brought to life by St. John Mandel so fully and completely that they could step off the pages and converse with you.
And what a conversation that would be!
Each of them living flawed but worthwhile lives, all of them making decisions which take them on courses that could have all kinds of outcomes and which over the course of Sea of Tranquility come to play out in ways that seem immutable and one-ended but which prove to be anything but.
Quite how the many threads converge is something that must, of course, be left to the reading since this is one novel that connects its seemingly disparate elements so poetically and completely but suffice to say, it is the perfect marriage of tantalisingly promise and satisfyingly resolution, a novel that runs, or rather walks thoughtfully, with its beguilingly out-there premise and does some wondrously good and enthralling things with it.
At the same time as you will find yourself satisfied by the way the start of Sea of Tranquility relates so perfectly to its exquisitely affecting finish, though they may not necessarily end up in that order in this linear-defying tale, you will be beautifully moved by the interweaving of character stories that may seem to be far apart in time and lived experience but which come to share more and mean more than anyone, including eagled-eyed readers, will ever suspect.