Sea of Tranquility

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is a book of literary science fiction. The book description from the publisher describes it best: “Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal–an experience that shocks him to his core. Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the black-skied Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe. A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.”

Sea of Tranquility is the latest book of literary science fiction—more literary than scientific—from Emily St. John Mandel about time travel that crosses many centuries from the early twentieth century to five hundred years later. We follow an exiled young socialite on his journey to Canada from England, an author from a moon colony on her book tour down on Earth, and a detective as they each witness a vision of a violinist in an airport terminal, an experience disconcerting to all of them as it's out of context to their life experience. What is this aural glitch? That's the heart of the narrative to this compelling and beautifully written novel.

One thing of note is that although this is a novel of science fiction, there is very little science or explanations of how this phenomena happens. Once revealed that we are in fact experiencing a kind of time travel, the effect is more hallucinatory than practical, more hypnotic than mechanical. Who is this violinist in the airport? Why are these three “seeing” him in different centuries? It's a mystery worth exploring for us readers.

St. John Mandel is an exceptional writer and her prose is elegant and restrained. She does a fantastic job of setting scenes and developing her characters, painting her story across many centuries poetically yet clearly. If there is one thing disappointing about this novel, then it's the explanation of how time travel is possible in this story. As someone who has read comic books and science fiction growing up as well as watching movies like The Matrix trilogy, the explanation of how the violinist time travels is not original; this theory (I won't give it away here) has been posed in so many other mediums. This revelation, though, didn't diminish my enjoyment of the novel. If science fiction without much science is a thing, then sign me up. I enjoyed being in St. John Mandel's universe of hallucinatory possibilities and the longing for human connection across realities and time.

I really enjoyed this novel and I highly recommend it. I would give this book 5 stars.