Book Review: "The Sea of Tranquility" by Emily St John Mandel

Reddit Book Club Pick Month: March 2024

“I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world."

- The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel

I often enjoy book club picks from different book clubs and that can also include the Reddit book club regardless of what people actually think of the website itself. For March 2024, one of the book club pick of the month for 'women writers'/'female authors' is The Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel and even though I have wanted to read this book for a while - this book club has honestly given me a reason to do so whilst also talking about it with other people. The book is split up into eight parts and has a kind of Cloud Atlas time quality to it. One third psychological drama, one third thriller and one third science fiction, the title refers to something I've only recently learned about the moon. It makes sense when you actually read the book but I won't reveal any spoilers here for now. Though, you have probably suspected that this is going to be a positive review. However, no story is completely perfect (okay, some are but not all of them).

The story, somewhat of an original concept (if you forget that novels like Cloud Atlas, short stories like All You Zombies and TV Shows like Dark exist) - starts with a man named Edwin who is sent to Canada because of his lacklustre remarks about colonialism in colonialist England, 1912. He comes across a wilderness area on his travels around the country and, apart from the fact he wanted to go in the first place, he now finds something weird come over him like he isn't supposed to be there at all. He meets a man he knows isn't the true priest of the church named 'Roberts'. But, when about to confront the man about his sinister means of getting to the church, Roberts vanishes.

The story flashes forward to a month or so before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The year is 2020 and the character of The Glass Hotel are back. Now, I don't think you need a knowledge of The Glass Hotel to know what is happening here. But again, we have a character who encounters someone named 'Roberts'. It's all starting to get a little strange and now certain characters are winding up 'gone' or worse, 'dead'.

We move forward in time once more but this time to a year we have not yet experienced where humans now also live on a colony of the moon. A female author who is touring Earth for the release of her book wishes she could see her child again on the moon but must get on with her job. Her husband phones and tells her of weird things that are happening at the university involving strange science and underground tunnels.

I'm not going to say anything else about the story because part of it involves looking for someone called 'The Anomaly' - no, it isn't The Matrix or Dark, but it has a familiar concept to both of them. I like the way it weaves the concepts together and though the book isn't really long enough to let me explore both of these without be thrust across different timelines against my will, I still think the book's delivery of the story is apt. The writing forms a fluent narrative and various metaphors and similes are used to enhance a story that readers are still both unfamiliar with and believe is a cliché.

I've seen some reviews state that a few of the characters feel a little flat and that might be true. Especially the characters like the husband of the author who seems to have no personality of his own and is only really there to advance the plot. However, I think these characters are used sparingly and apart from him and possibly Vincent's brother, I cannot say that I felt any of the characters were particularly flat. A lot of the characters in this novel are actually better than the cast of The Glass Hotel - and that's really just my opinion (that isn't shared by many readers of Emily St John Mandel).

All in all, I found the book to be an achievement of meticulous planning and well written narratives. Each narrative feels like its own and all are interwoven together to create something quite expansive. Now, it may not be a Cloud Atlas level of achievement, but at least it's somewhere in the ballpark.