In “Sea of Tranquility,” Emily St. John Mandel’s Characters Cross Time and Space

Photo credit: Author photo:Sarah Shatz
Photo credit: Author photo:Sarah Shatz
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“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” might be the artistic mantra of Emily St. John Mandel, author of six novels, including the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, which also became an HBO limited series. Terrible things happen in her books—worlds end, lives crash, large numbers of people die—but even as Mandel looks at these events without flinching, she also always finds a way to upend our usual takes on them. In Station Eleven, a pandemic far worse than Covid really does end civilization as we know it, but the few survivors find courage in art and one another, and life goes on. In The Glass Hotel, a corrupt financier destroys many people’s lives, but empathic connections among them remain even after the worst has happened, stubborn signs of life. Mandel’s perspective is, in its way, tough-minded. Material destruction never trumps emotional ties and the life force, no matter how vast and deep that destruction might be. Survival, she has suggested again and again, may depend more on one’s ability to love than on how well-appointed a fortress one’s bunker is. This sounds sweet until you think about it for a minute. Are you prepared to love the stinking homeless person, or the grifter, or strangers on the road in a ruined world as if your life depended on it?

In her latest, Sea of Tranquility, Mandel takes her philosophy into outer space and the far reaches of time. The novel follows a group of characters from 1912 to 2401, hopscotching through centuries in a deft, sure-handed narrative. While no character is the center, there are three who form a sort of main constellation: Edwin St. Andrew, a young, rich Brit who seems to be idling through life in 1912; Olive Llewellyn, a writer on book tour in 2203; and Gaspery Roberts, a somewhat feckless young man in 2401 who finds himself investigating a major mystery of the time-space continuum. There are others as well whom readers might remember from The Glass Hotel, now launched into futures that go far beyond where that book ended—just like life, which does tend to go on, until it doesn’t. Disasters in this novel, as in human history, are many: pandemics, wars, imperialism, climate catastrophe, failed frontier outposts, broken hearts, what seems to be the dissolution of the United States into separate nations, murder, and the very real possibility that we’re living in a massive simulation à la The Matrix.

The future, in other words, has the same proportions of human heroism, folly, brilliance, greed, and resilience that it does right now. Some of the funniest and most pointed moments in the book occur on Olive’s book tour. It may be 2203, but the hotel rooms are still bland, sexism is still rampant, and the author still half-wishes she were back home with her family and half-revels in the new people and places on her long journey. Olive lives on Colony Two, the second moon colony since so much of Earth became uninhabitable due to climate change, but the fact that book tours are now interplanetary doesn’t make them any less grinding.

One feels that Mandel may be poking fun at herself a little as Olive slumps, exhausted, from stop to stop, grumpy and thinking ungracious thoughts. Olive also gives a lecture about post-apocalyptic fiction in which she says, “When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending?” She continues, “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world as a continuous and never-ending process.” Mandel almost seems to be looking straight at the reader in this lecture, asking us, in effect, to look beyond the spectacle of apocalypse to the long sweep of history. The point isn’t the end, because there isn’t a definitive end, just a series of endings. The point is what the people left do next.

Also, like Mandel herself with Station Eleven (which was published in 2014), Olive has serendipitously published a novel that features a global pandemic just before one actually happens. As life begins to imitate her art, Olive doesn’t entirely notice the drumbeats of disaster; she has so many other things on her mind, and so many people in her face all day long. It’s just a cluster of cases in Australia, right? On to the next airship going to the next city. We always hope we’ll be smarter next time, but, generally speaking, we aren’t. Technology may advance by leaps, but human nature progresses slowly, awkwardly, and rarely in a straight line.

Mandel’s world-building in Sea of Tranquility is fluid, believable, and only as detailed as it needs to be. The tech, like the massive movements of history, is less important to her than the people who ride on it, communicate with it, and at times become disoriented or overwhelmed by it. There are airships, moon colonies, holograms, super-duper computers, and hovercrafts, but Mandel doesn’t lavish much attention on them. Earth, when characters who live on other planets visit it, is still—in parts—beautiful and various and wonderfully unprogrammed or constructed by people. Mandel’s descriptions of the moon colonies make them sound like very high-end malls: highly regulated, sometimes lovely, and entirely enclosed. Even here, though, she refuses existential despair. As Olive puts it, “A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life.” Mandel sees the simulation hypothesis in the same refreshingly unbothered way. “A life lived in a simulation,” reflects Gaspery at one point, “is still a life.”

The futuristic innovation that clearly captures Mandel’s imagination, however, and on which much of this novel depends, is time travel. Here we come to a tricky point, because it’s difficult to discuss this aspect of the book without major spoilers. I can say that Mandel uses as light a touch with this technology as with any of the others. The “travel chamber,” for instance, is described like this:

“It was a midsize room made entirely of some kind of composite stone. At one end was a bench, molded into a deep indentation in the wall. The bench faced an extremely ordinary-looking desk.”

What happens once a character goes into that chamber, and how it changes everything you thought you knew about the book you’ve been reading, is the actual plot here. You realize that Mandel has had this card up her sleeve the entire time, and when she plays it, you hold your breath, because the outcome matters tremendously, not only to the characters, but also to the argument the book has been subtly making all along. A character has a choice to make, and that choice will have profound effects up and down the centuries. That choice, moreover, is a moral one. You may have been turning the pages swiftly and with pleasure, enjoying Mandel’s wit and delight in her characters, but now you see that she has led you to a bit of a cliff. What happens next and what will the consequences be?

As the book doubles back on itself, inviting us to reread and rethink every page, it also, ever so charmingly, invites us to rethink what our choices might be in similar circumstances, and why. In this way, Sea of Tranquility goes beyond Station Eleven in what it asks of its characters. In Station Eleven, the will to live was the engine, and any other choice simply meant death. In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel asks her characters, and us, to choose how to live—with what values, principles, and fellow feeling. Whether one lives in a dome, a simulation, or on Earth soil is less important to her than with what values one lives there and according to what ethics. Again, this sounds sweet until one thinks about it a minute. If humanity goes to all the trouble and expense of building colonies on the moon and constructing time-travel chambers but doesn’t pause to consider what it means to be a person living in community with others across time, then what does all that gadgetry matter? We like to think that gadgets can save us, or that the lack of them can kill us, but—news flash—it might not be about the gadgets at all. It might just be about us.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. In this novel, you may think that it’s wandering around, having a pleasant little ramble through time periods until you see that it knew exactly where it was going all along, straight to the heart of the matter.

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, The Sky Below, Wonderland, and The Complicities, which is forthcoming from Algonquin in September; and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between. She is a former Stegner Fellow in Fiction, the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, and the winner of an Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. She is an associate professor of writing and publishing practices at Fordham University.


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