The one rule that should never be broken for time travel is that you should just observe the past, never change it. It’s a rule that tests investigators from the Time Institute, situated in Colony Two on the moon.
Gaspery Roberts, after a going-nowhere career as a security guard in a hotel, would like to be given a chance to test himself investigating the past. The golden rule in fiction is that protagonists are introduced front and centre in the narrative. In this page-turning novel, Gaspery is merely an incidental character in the first half of the book. This is far from a mistake, however, as Mandel eases the reader into an imagined world from the recognisable past to the present and through to the future.
Three separate characters, from three separate time periods witness what feels like an hallucination to them: under a maple tree in a forest in British Columbia, a blackout, and violin music in a station of some sort. Edwin (exiled from England) knelt under the tree in 1912; Vincent filmed it by accident in 1994; Olive (bestselling author, with a character after whom Gaspery is named) walked through the terminal in 2203.
Gaspery’s sister, Zoey, works as a scientist in the Time Institute. While Gaspery is keen to investigate this apparent glitch in time, Zoey fears for his future should things go wrong. Pandemics – sadly very topical – appear throughout.
Mandel envisions each time period flawlessly, capturing and rounding every character and place into a believable whole. She even finds space for a metanarrative on post-apocalyptic fiction. Her plotting is exceptional, with the denouement offering a plausible and inevitable conclusion. Without doubt, Sea of Tranquility is the best speculative fiction this year.
Reviewed by Bob Moore
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
St John is my middle name. The books go under M.
Emily St John Mandel is the author of six novels, most recently Sea of Tranquility, which has been translated into 25 languages and was selected by President Barack Obama as one of his favourite books of 2022. Her previous novels include The Glass Hotel, which was also on Obama’s list, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and has been translated into 26 languages; and Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award among other honours, has been translated into 36 languages, and aired as a limited series on HBO Max. She lives in New York City and Los Angeles.
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