Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
Edwin St. Andrew, exiled from polite society after a poorly thought-out rant at a dinner party, is eighteen years old when he travels across the Atlantic by steamship. He explores the forest, mesmerized by the splendour of the Canadian environment, and is completely taken aback when he unexpectedly hears the violin playing in an airship terminal.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
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A well-known author named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour two centuries later. Her home is the second moon colony, a haven of white stone, spired towers, and manufactured beauty, though she travels all around Earth.
A bizarre chapter can be found in Olive’s best-selling pandemic book: a man plays his violin for change while the trees of a forest rise around him in the echoing hallway of an airship terminal.
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 are just a few of the lives Gaspery-Jacques Roberts discovers when he is hired as a detective in the nighttime Night City to look into an anomaly in the North American wilderness.
The story begins in 1912 with Edwin, a young man who has been humiliated by both his family and his country. He was unable to control his speech, and as a result, he is now halfway across the globe, in the wilderness of Western Canada. Edwin enters a situation that makes him doubt his sanity as he walks the woodland. “He moves forward into a sudden burst of darkness that looks like an eclipse or abrupt blindness. He gets the feeling that he is in a large inner space, perhaps a cathedral or a train station. Violin notes are playing, other individuals are around, and suddenly there is an unidentifiable sound.”
Just when we are starting to consider the consequences of what Edwin goes through, Mandel jumps us forward a century. A composer is shown delivering a talk on his work that revolves around a video shot by his sister. She can be heard wandering through the woodland in the recording as time and space appear to flicker. Mandel advances the action to the year 2203 before we have a chance to process what we have read. We meet a novelist who is marketing her most recent book while out on tour. She was brought back to earth by the tour from her home on a moon colony. News that a plague is starting to spread over the earth is announced as she laments missing her family.
In a work of fiction that accurately depicts Madel’s life, the author is faced with the challenge of book promotion while a deadly disease spreads.
The novel of time travel and metaphysics Sea of Tranquility is a masterful performance that is as personal and compassionate as it is intellectually amusing, and it perfectly portrays the reality of our current moment.
