Halfway through Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Sea of tranquility one of her characters questions the idea that we live in a simulation, as suggested by certain clues. “It may be a bit naive of me, but I feel like a simulation should be better. I mean, if you go to the trouble of simulating that street, for example, wouldn’t you make sure all the streetlights work?’
I’d say no. It is precisely frayed edges that make a simulation credible. This touches on how fiction works, especially the type of speculative fiction that the Canadian author is doing here. Every novel world is a simulation, a construction in which the reader has to believe. But how can the reader simultaneously believe in Canada in 1912, a lunar colony in the year 2401, and different worlds in between? How to make the reader believe in a tear in the fabric of the universe, and in the time travel that allows former hotel detective Gaspery Roberts to investigate the nature and meaning of that ‘mutilation’? A mutilation that briefly allowed several times to exist at once? It takes the utmost of a writer’s sense of dosage (what do you tell and what not), for world building and for the wheels of the story. Nothing should reveal that the reader is taking in a simulation.
Sea of tranquility is a novel that stands on its own, but which in many ways also interacts with Mandel’s earlier work. It is, above all, a pandemic novel that reflects on the incessant apocalypse that confronts people, if only on an individual level.
Georgian flu
The story begins in 1912, when eighteen-year-old Edwin St. John St. Andrew, bearing his “double hallowed name” moves to Canada by steamship. He is the obstinate, third son of a noble British family, the type who is pushed out of the picture because he is a burden and a disgrace. Mandel sketches in short, accurate brushstrokes Edwin’s days in Canada, ending in the wilds of the west, where he ends up in a forest, a place that is ‘completely neutral [is] as to whether he lives or dies’. Here he meets a strange visitor, a man named Roberts, and shortly afterwards has a shocking experience, which you could call a paranormal, or a hallucination, or something else. Edwin hears violin sounds and the sounds of an airship taking off in another century.
In the second part of Sea of tranquility we meet an old acquaintance, Mirella Kessler, who also appeared in Mandel’s novel The glass hotel figures. It is 2020, the ‘Wuhan story’ is about to start, but more importantly: Mirella also appears to have been touched by the phenomenon Edwin was confronted with in the forest.
And then there’s the most interesting character, Olive Llewellyn, bestselling author in the year 2203, living on the moon, but now on a book tour of Earth, where she is famous for her novel Marienbadwhich relies heavily on its research into pandemics. Marienbad threatens to take on a new meaning with another pandemic on the brink of breaking out.
This is unmistakably a reference to Mandel’s own history: through her book Eleven . Station (2014), which focuses on the post-apocalyptic world following an outbreak of the very deadly ‘Georgian flu’, Mandel has acquired the aura of a seer in recent years. Much of what Llewellyn is going through feels taken from real life: from a reader’s complaint that Marienbad confusing (“you had all those storylines and then all those characters and I kept waiting for it to all come together, so to speak, but it didn’t”), to the conversations in taxis, the visits to festivals and bookstores. But also: the outbreak of that new pandemic and the years in isolation, echoing the time when Sea of tranquility must be written.
Tasteful modesty
There you go, a novel with current themes, a human dimension and an intriguing central theme. And yet something is wrong.
Mandel wisely chooses not to explain her different worlds in detail – they unfold naturally, which they are accustomed to for the characters. In doing so, she invites the reader in, especially readers with a certain reluctance for science fiction. But tasteful modesty does not relieve an author of the task of mastering all the backgrounds and details, so that the administration can be dosed perfectly. If not, you risk breaking the spell anyway, and that’s what happens several times here.
Sometimes Mandel’s world is inconsistent, and sometimes he seems inconsistent because there is just too little said. Example: Writer Olive Llewellyn grew up on the moon and lives there. You would think: under much lower gravity, which should have enormous physiological consequences. But strangely enough, this is not noticeable during the book tour on earth. No continuous exhaustion, no weakened muscles, no increased heart rate. This reader then suspects a huge fallacy, until late in the book something is casually said about gravity-enhancing technology being used in the lunar colonies. An easy-going stop-lap?
In the same way I was pulled out of Mandel’s world by strange discrepancies in technological development – the twenty-fifth century is sometimes remarkably close to our time. You could even say that Mandel’s people of the twenty-fifth century too resemble the people of today, as if we were not fundamentally different in behaviour, morals and even physical form from people of the seventeenth century. And then there’s a sleight of hand with which Mandel tries to divert our attention from a hole in the plot (I won’t say which one).
Also read the review of The glass hotel† Hiding in a luxury hotel because you ruined a life
time travel puzzle
We are dealing with a classic time travel puzzle. A paradox. A brain teaser. The fun of such stories is solving the puzzle, or rather, seeing them solved before you have guessed the solution yourself. Personally, I don’t find such a puzzle that interesting anymore – it’s all been done already, and better, from Heinlein’s short story ‘All You Zombies’ (1958) to Ted Chiang’s novella Story of Your Life (1998), and endless examples in between. Moreover, films and books have already trained us so much in deciphering that Mandel’s solution is no longer really surprising. By emphasizing the puzzle, the philosophical and metaphorical possibilities of time travel are often neglected. What you hope for, at least I do, is a draft that deepens upon reconsideration and eventual rereading. That it doesn’t matter if the puzzle is solved.
Mandel has an intriguing fact in his sights: is the world real, and if not, what does that mean? This fact deserves a stronger elaboration. The same goes for the moral question that time travel raises and which is handled very smoothly here, and the often too sketchy material that talks about our own pandemic time. There is little wrong with Mandel’s drawing of the characters and the confident, subtly lyrical touch of her language, here skilfully translated by Lucie Schaap. But somewhere in this book is hidden a better and more important book, a book that you can almost touch, but just slipped away.