John Mandel’s earlier work, Marienbad supplies significant literary references to the characters in Sea of Tranquility. Moreover, just as Sea of Tranquility poaches characters from St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Olive’s pandemic novel, Marienbad, has benefited from booming sales after an actual pandemic strikes earth. And then there is Gaspery-Jacques, a shadowy figure from the “Night City” moon colony, whose detective work ties everything together. John Mandel’s doppelganger, who is embarking on the “last book tour on Earth,” is the most fully drawn character. He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are people around him, and then an incomprehensible sound.” This jumbled vision appears again in the 2020 strand of the novel in a video created by the artist brother of a friend of Mirella, the 21st-century protagonist. He is the first to experience the temporal anomaly at the center of the book: “a flash of darkness, like sudden blindness or an eclipse. Andrew (based on one of the author’s great-grandfathers), has been exiled to British Columbia from England for anti-colonial remarks at a dinner party.
This science fiction element allows for plausible time travel, which turns out to be the key that unlocks the apparent disconnections between the four settings.Įach time period features a major character. Sea of Tranquility zips through space and time, though it is primarily set in four main periods: the earlier 20th century (1912), the present (2020), the distant future (2203), and the really distant future (2401). John Mandel’s new novel, a reader should be familiar with her two previous efforts: the groundbreaking pre-COVID pandemic novel, Station Eleven, and 2020’s The Glass Hotel, which explores of the global financial crisis of 2008 and features a Bernie Madoff–like scam artist.īy comparison, the storylines of those two novels were straightforward.
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