Mandel builds this novel on one unnerving proposition. The strangest thing about being alive may be how little evidence any of us has that it is real. She refuses to make that into philosophy homework. Instead she hands the question to a handful of people scattered across five centuries, stands each of them in the same impossible instant, and watches what it costs them afterward.
The book opens with Edwin St. Andrew, eighteen years old and shipped off to Canada in 1912 for saying the wrong thing about empire at his father's dinner table. His exile is written as a small social death, which is what it would have been. What gets me about these early chapters is how much weather is in them. Edwin walks into the forest on Vancouver Island in a state somewhere between wonder and grief, and the trees do not comfort him, they make him smaller in a way he half wants. Then, under those trees, a violin. An airship terminal. The rush of machinery that has no business existing for another two hundred years. It lasts a few seconds and it ruins his life.
Two centuries on we meet Olive Llewellyn, a novelist from the moon's second colony, mid-book-tour on Earth, answering the same three interview questions in her fourth city that week while a new virus starts turning up in the news. Mandel wrote these pages in the first year of a pandemic and you can feel the fatigue in them, though never the self-pity. Hotel corridors. Airport queues. A call home to a daughter she is missing by weeks. Olive's sections are the funniest in the book and also the most sorrowful, because she is the character who understands exactly how her own novel gets misread and has no idea at all what is coming. There is a running gag about the one passage every interviewer asks her to explain. It stops being a gag.
Gaspery-Jacques Roberts arrives last, out of the Night City, a place lit only by streetlamps where the sky is a painted ceiling and nobody has stood in real weather. Mandel gives the Night City just enough detail to ache: white stone, spired towers, an artificial dusk kept on a schedule. He takes an investigator's job he is plainly underqualified for and goes looking for the anomaly the first two sections have been circling without naming. Here the novel's machinery becomes visible, and here a certain reader will start doing the math. Mandel's time travel is not rigorous. The rules are thin, the paradoxes get a shrug, and anyone who came for a puzzle box will feel short-changed. I found I didn't mind. The pull of the book is what Gaspery does when the job requires him to watch a person suffer and then file a report about it.
At 274 pages this is a short novel doing long-novel work, and the compression is the craft. Mandel writes in brief titled sections, some barely a page, and trusts you to carry three timelines without a map. It holds because her images come back: a violin, a stand of old growth, an echoing terminal, a hand flat against glass. Each return carries more weight than the last. She also has a habit of cutting a section one beat before you expect it to end, which leaves the reader to supply the feeling the prose declined to spell out, and that restraint is why the short chapters never read as thin. Plenty of readers stall in the first fifty pages, and it is easy to see why, since two of the three storylines have to be laid down before anything connects and until then the book keeps you at arm's length. Get to the Olive section. From there it starts paying attention to you.
Why you should read
- Loved Station Eleven and want more of that register
- Time travel written for feeling rather than physics
- Short literary novels that reward a second read
- Pandemic fiction written from inside the experience
What to expect
- Three timelines that stay separate for the first third
- Brief titled sections, several under a single page
- Compressed at 274 pages with no wasted scene
- Loose time-travel rules, held loose on purpose
Station Eleven made a version of this argument at greater length, with a traveling orchestra to carry it. Sea of Tranquility is leaner, stranger, and to my mind more moving, because it declines the grand gesture. Its last movement gives one person the chance to change a single life and asks what that ought to cost. The calculation is never framed as heroism. It is something a decent person does badly, and does anyway. Five hundred years of setting, an interplanetary premise, a whole apparatus of time travel, and the book comes to rest on somebody choosing kindness at one specific hour on one specific afternoon. That is an enormous amount of machinery for a small gesture. In Mandel's hands it is also exactly the right amount.
