{"id":5715,"date":"2022-07-22T11:04:19","date_gmt":"2022-07-22T01:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=5715"},"modified":"2022-07-22T11:36:34","modified_gmt":"2022-07-22T01:36:34","slug":"sea-of-tranquility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=5715","title":{"rendered":"SEA OF TRANQUILITY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2026as a species, we have a desire to believe that we\u2019re living at the climax of the story. It\u2019s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we\u2019re uniquely important, that we\u2019re living at the end of history, that <\/em>now, after all those millennia of false alarms, <\/em>now is finally the worst that it\u2019s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.<\/em><\/p>\n

Emily Mandel St John’s Station Eleven<\/em> was one of my favourite books of 2014. Given what happened to us all in 2020, it now seems eerily prescient; the premise of the novel is a pandemic, the \u201cGeorgia Flu\u201d which sweeps over the planet with devastating speed and kills most of the population. With what seems to be St John\u2019s trademark style, the novel loops around in time and place and between characters. The pandemic sections are harrowing; her vision of the future is not as terrifying as that of Cormac Mcarthy in The Road<\/em>, but it\u2019s scary enough. Her 2020 novel, The Glass Hotel<\/em>, was more realistic, following a woman and her conman husband as his Ponzi-style scam slowly crashes and burns, eventually unleashing a whirlwind of damage and tragedy.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In St John\u2019s latest book Sea of Tranquility<\/em>, we are back to the future, by way of the past.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 1912. Young English \u2018Remittance man\u2019 Edwin St Andrew is a bit of a lost soul, idly travelling around British Columbia, when he has a strange, other-worldly experience in the rainforest which makes him doubt his sanity.<\/p>\n

Then the reader is in 2020, revisiting Mirella and Vincent, characters from The Glass Hotel. <\/em>Next, we move to 2203, when there are colonies on the moon, a radically reconfigured geo-political landscape and a famous writer called Olive Llewellyn is on \u2018The Last Book Tour on Earth\u2019 as yet another new pandemic takes hold. When she returns to her home on the moon, it\u2019s into lockdown. Then, 2401, the population lives in giant domes and a detective called Gaspery-Jaques Roberts is hired to investigate a \u2018time anomaly\u2019 \u2013 which involves Edwin, Mirella, Vincent and Olive.<\/p>\n

Though it sounds like sci-fi or speculative fiction \u2013 and in a sense I suppose it is \u2013 it\u2019s not weighed down with tech. It\u2019s the people I cared about. I loved the way Mandel anchored their strange and futuristic situations in life as we know it, now and in the past.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s shocking to wake up in one world and find yourself in another by nightfall but the situation isn\u2019t actually all that unusual. You wake up married, then your spouse dies over the course of the day; you wake up in peacetime and by noon your country is at war; you wake in ignorance and by evening it\u2019s clear that a pandemic is already here. You wake on a book tour with several days left to go, and by evening you\u2019re racing towards home, your suitcase abandoned in a hotel room. <\/em><\/p>\n

I also loved her beautiful prose. Sentence by sentence, Mandel\u2019s writing is lovely.<\/p>\n

What it was like to leave the Earth:
\n<\/em>A rapid ascent over the blue-green world, and then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then \u2013 it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble \u2013 there was black space.<\/em><\/p>\n

I am not going to give away any spoilers about the plot \u2013 the \u2018time anomaly\u2019 \u2013 the weird event that so spooked the young Englishman in 1912 and reverberated through the centuries. The plot was puzzling, and fun and thought-provoking, but what I was left with was a kind of gentle wisdom. Life can be tranquil in the face of death. \u00a0No star burns forever. Somewhere, for someone, the world is always ending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2026as a species, we have a desire to believe that we\u2019re living at the climax of the story. It\u2019s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we\u2019re uniquely important, that we\u2019re living at the end of history, that … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5715"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5720,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5715\/revisions\/5720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}