Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Some aspects of the novel are especially enjoyable the Olive strand, in which her book tour is imperilled by a deadly pandemic, combines satire with light-touch contemporary resonance, and the opening Canada material is so offbeat that you wish it could continue for longer. The combination of speculative science-fiction drama with contemporary concerns grips throughoutĪnyone who has read Cloud Atlas– or indeed St John Mandel’s breakout novel Station Eleven– will be familiar with the time-hopping, symmetrical structure that she adopts, but this remains a fiercely original creation. The recurring motif that unites them all is the sound of a violin heard in an unnatural setting its significance becomes increasingly clear as the narrative progresses. He has been sent back from the far-distant future to interact with apparently disparate figures, from the 23rd-century novelist Olive to the disgraced “remittance man” Edwin St Andrew, making his uncertain way in 1912 Canada. Over its spare length, St John Mandel’s book juggles a variety of storylines, loosely connected by the pivotal character of the time-travelling detective Gaspery-Jacques Roberts. Some may agree with this as a description of Sea of Tranquility, but it also elegantly anticipates censure of this thought-provoking read.

Her interlocutor impatiently claims “there were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t ultimately”.

I t is a bold author who heads off potential criticisms of their work with a self-aware allusion, but in Emily St John Mandel’s ambitious new novel, the character of the writer Olive Llewellyn is confronted by an unimpressed reader in a book-signing queue.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel