Book Club Review: Sea of Tranquility

A speculative fiction novel that jumps from 1912 colonial Canada to the Lunar Colonies of 2401, Sea of Tranquillity, by Canadian novelist, Emily St. John Mandel is an elegiac and panoramic work that tackles thorny ideas such as time travel and the simulation hypothesis. Following a large cast of characters including a wayward Time Institute employee, a novelist on a book tour at the beginning of a global pandemic, and a disgraced British nobleman, Mandel’s work is a fascinating tapestry which intricately tackles themes of time, isolation, physics, grief, change, and memory.

As a whole, the group has mixed feelings about the book. Some of us enjoyed the book’s structure and plotting and found the speculative elements to be really thought-provoking and compelling. However, some of us found the book’s plot to be somewhat underdeveloped and a little flimsy and thought that it jumped too quickly between periods without properly fleshing out its settings or characters.

We all agreed that the book was more enjoyable if you had an awareness of its intertextual references. Several characters in the book first appeared in Mandel’s previous novels, they share a similar structure, and there are lots of shared themes between her books, such as her focus on pandemics and post-apocalyptic scenarios. However, we also thought that needing to know these things in order to make sense of the novel’s events or gain greater enjoyment from its world-building meant that the novel failed as a stand-alone work.

There were also differences in opinion as to which section of the novel was the most enjoyable, with some of us favoured the section which focused on Olive, a novelist on tour for her latest book in 2203, while others preferred the sections which focused on Gaspery-Jacques, the errant time traveller.

Overall, we all had pretty lukewarm feelings about the book. Our average rating of Sea of Tranquillity was 7/10.

Book Club will meet next year in the Library to discuss the book Leave the World Behind by American novelist Rumaan Alam. A tense thriller set in the midst of a mysterious, cataclysmic event, Leave the World Behind received widespread acclaim upon its release and has recently been adapted into a Netflix film starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali.