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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