A Book Review of Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
Book review: New sci-fi novel a profound meditation on what it means to alive through a disaster
Sea of Quiet is a profound meditation on what it ways to live through a disaster.
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Bounding main of Tranquility 
Emily St. John Mandel | HarperCollins Canada (Toronto, 2022)
$29.99 | 272 pages
"Is this the promised end?"
In a nested story of epic tragedies, Emily St. John Mandel looks to the inevitable time to come.
Partway through Bounding main of Tranquility, the sixth novel from Mandel, a reporter asks the novelist Olive Llewllyn what she's working on. "I'one thousand writing this crazy sci-fi matter," she responds. "Information technology's kind of deranged, actually." "I suppose anything written this year would be," the reporter answers.
Like Mandel, Olive is best known for her novel about a "scientifically implausible pandemic", Marienbad. As her story opens, she is on a tour to promote the book, which like Mandel's Station 11 is existence adapted for the screen, when a real pandemic breaks out. Olive, speaking to the reporter, is at present in lockdown, as Mandel was when she wrote Sea of Tranquility. The critical difference betwixt the two is that Olive lives on a moon colony.
Bounding main of Tranquility is Mandel'due south first foray into science fiction, dissever across 4 characters and fourth dimension periods: Edwin St. John St. Andrew, exiled by his British parents to Canada in 1912; Mirella Kessler, a Ponzi scheme victim who appeared in Mandel's last novel, The Drinking glass Hotel, and whose story begins in 2020; Olive Llewllyn, in 2203; and Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a fourth dimension traveller from 2401 whose investigation of a infinite-time anomaly links the characters. The title refers to the original moon-landing site, conforming a novel about iv people who each notice themselves adrift in strange, unfamiliar worlds.
It's Mandel's most sprawling and structurally circuitous novel to engagement, a divergence from the non-linear narratives of her previous books. The stories are nested, proceeding chronologically from Edwin to Gaspery-Jacques, before receding back through fourth dimension sequentially. Mandel's clearest inspiration is David Mitchell, whose 2004 novel Cloud Atlas employs the same mirrored structure, and whose novels weave together to create what he calls an "Über-novel." Sea of Tranquility confirms that Mandel has besides been building a fictional multiverse, cross-pollinating her novels with shared characters and overlapping events.
Information technology sounds dizzying, but Mandel is a precise and focused storyteller. She doesn't over-explicate her futuristic settings; her descriptions are evocative rather than technical. Of a flight to the moon, she writes: "A rapid ascent over the greenish-and-bluish-world, and so the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The temper turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo and then — it was like slipping through the pare of a bubble — at that place was black infinite." At fewer than 300 pages, the story moves chop-chop, propelled past Mandel's understated prose toward a surprisingly tidy resolution.
A line from Male monarch Lear appears and reappears in the novel, resonating with each character's world-shattering loss: "Is this the promised end?" Simply of course, it never is.
"As a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story," Olive says. But in the end, none of u.s.a. is the protagonist of human history; we are all but incidental characters in someone else'southward story.
Sea of Tranquility is a profound meditation on what it means to live through a disaster, itself a reminder of the random events that shape our lives and how, through our choices, we imbue them with pregnant.
Michelle Cyca is a writer and editor living in Vancouver.
Source: https://vancouversun.com/entertainment/books/book-review-new-sci-fi-novel-a-profound-meditation-on-what-it-means-to-live-through-a-disaster
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