Sea of Tranquility

The nice thing about GoodReads is that it stores all kinds of data about the books you read. For example, the date on which you finished reading a particular book (if you enter the date correctly, of course). This means I can see that I finished reading You have a friend in 10A on April 9th and Sea of Tranquility on April 11th. Which means I read Sea of Tranquility in just two days.
This may not be that surprising, since Emily St. John Mandel was my favourite new author of 2022 and I couldn't wait to get my hands on a paperback copy of her newest novel (which I surprisingly did not find in the biggest European bookstore in London but in my own local bookstore-around-the-corner). And I was on holiday in early April, so plenty of time to read. But the novel that originally drew me to her work, Station Eleven, was one of those that I like to spread out over as much time as possible, just for the story not to be over. I would have thought Sea of Tranquility would have the same effect, but somehow, I flew through it. 

The reason I haven't written about it earlier is that I still can't fully make up my mind about the book; how much do I like it?

The novel takes a similar pattern to Cloud Atlas, with several interconnected stories set apart in time and featuring different protagonists. We first travel forward in time from 1912 to 2401, and then back again to 1918. Just like David Mitchell, Emily St. John Mandel has recurring characters in all of her novels, which gives another layer of interconnection. Even thought it is executed well, it sometimes made the whole thing feel like a bit of a combined copy of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks (added to which, while David Mitchell's novels lean more towards fantasy, there is an apocalyptical undertone to both authors).

Although the interconnection is a nice element, it can become somewhat of a lazy read because you already know some of the main characters or the people they interact with. Ah, yes, the guy who stole his sister's videos and has now become a big artist by setting them to music. We know the guy, we know his sister Vincent, we know how their stories end. There are new things to learn of course, like how Mirella's story ends after Vincent looses sight of her in The Glass Hotel, but those chapters somehow feel like a sequel to that novel, knocked out to cash on something that already worked before rather than an original new story.

Added to that, some parts of the story seem too easily autobiographical. One of the protagonists is a female author on a book tour after the success of her novel on a post-pandemic apocalyptical world. She has repeated discussions with readers concerning a death scene it that novel, which is eerily familiar to exactly that scene in Station Eleven. The descriptions of a book tour, the people met and the loneliness felt, clearly tell us something about the author's experience after her novel became a big seller. Added to that, several parts are again set on Vancouver island, albeit in the distant past, but it felt like things I had read before, places I had already been.

Which is maybe why I liked the chapters that included wholly new storylines and characters better. Especially the parts set in space, where man has colonised the Moon as a trial version of later colonies further away, with the trial now having become redundant and the Moon colonies just another sad backwater to grow up in. The theme of time travel runs throughout the novel, with its own mind-bending puzzle at the end; if they had not travelled in time, would the need to travel in time actually have been there, causing the whole story to unravel? I can never get my head around these things, but in this novel it felt neatly wrapped up.

And as always, the writing is beautiful. Sometimes just two or three sentences suffice to set an entire scene or describe an entire personality. Sea of Tranquility felt a lot shorter than the other novels, as thought the writing was a bit lighter, less filled with meaning. That is to say, the meaning is mostly in the plot and the musings on time travel, and less in the words on the page.

All in all, I enjoyed reading the book immesely. It has made me buy all three books published before Station Eleven, just to have the matching set. But I do hope that in a next novel, we get to meet new characters, discover new places, discuss new ideas. For even though this book does not feel like the same trick all over again, there are many fresh ideas and new angles, it does start to feel a bit stale around the edges.