Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

 

One of the few disadvantages of reading voraciously is analogous to eating a many-course gourmet meal: it's difficult to savor one because of the conflicting details. That's a small lingering regret after finishing Emily St. John Mandel's latest novel Sea of Tranquility. With so many--and such varied--books I have read this summer, I feel the need to sit with this one a little longer.

Like Trust by Hernan Diaz, which I discussed in an earlier post, this novel makes me envious of the writer's sheer ability to weave and order a story like this. With the many characters over centuries, the author plays with historical fiction, time travel, and the impact of technology. From 1912 to the 23rd century, from Europe to the  New World to the second colony on the moon, Emily St. John Mandel pulls together a shared paranormal experience, plagues, book tours, and avant-garde film, without dropping a single stitch.

I confess that although I read (and loved) The Glass Hotel, I completely missed that the character Vincent in Sea of Tranquility was a character in the earlier novel. Perhaps this is good justification for literature tests asking students to remember names, dates, and places. When Jennifer Egan pulled a similar sleight of hand in Candy House and when Stephen King planted little details from The Shining in Billy Summers, (and should I mention David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks?) I was gratified to recognize the connection. Somehow, though, I want to re-read--or at least review--the original novel.

I've seen people ask on reading sites whether it's important to read The Glass Hotel first; I'd say, no. Honestly, it might be interesting to read it second to see if personal literary time travel works just as well. If only my list of what to read next weren't so long, I might do just that.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Celebrating Summer Reading: Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel

One mark of a good writer is the capacity to follow one engaging novel with another without reusing the same patterns or retelling the same tale. Emily St. John Mandel's novel Station Eleven was both engrossing and haunting, following a troupe of actors in a post-apocalyptic world.

Her newest novel The Glass Hotel is set firmly in this world, but it grabs readers early and doesn't let go. Mandel begins the book with three minimal glimpses of events from later in the story. They are vague enough not to reveal the characters involved, but specific enough in their imagery to remain like a bookmark for the reader.

The narrative first follows Paul, back at his father's home after his step-sister Vincent's mother disappears while boating alone, and then as he becomes infatuated with a female singer at a bar before giving her and her colleagues what end up being tainted drugs to one of her band members. Needing to get away to avoid any responsibility, he takes a menial job at the hotel to which the title refers, where Vincent works as bartender. An elaborate hotel on an island near Vancouver, it accommodates wealthy guests who want all the comforts and pleasures, while completely isolated from the world.

The focus moves away from Paul to his sister Vincent, when she meets one of the wealthy guests who actually owns the hotel, Jonathan Alkaitas, recently widowed. She next appears in tabloids as his wife--a fiction the two create to allow her to play a needed role in his life, while letting her to live as she pleases, with her new persona, shopping and dining without concert for credit limits.

The story takes a sharp turn when Alkaitas' business collapses, revealed as a Ponzi scheme, landing him in prison, from which a portion of the narrative is told.

Mandel introduces minor characters, then weaves together the cast of characters and their storylines, using what at first seem to be minor details--messages etched on windows, Vincent's habit of filming five-minute videos. The details come together to produce a story that is fresh and suspenseful. Not once did the story recall Station Eleven. Anyone who reads both novels will be tempted to look for her earlier works until her next novel is published.

Celebrating Summer Reading: Emily St. John Mandel's The Glass Hotel

Emily St. John Mandel's Station 11: King Lear, Apocalypse, and the Georgia flu.

While I don't necessarily gravitate toward post-apocalyptic novels, they do show up on my radar frequently. At the end of the year, when I was asking other readers about their best books from 2015, Station Eleven  by Emily St. John Mandel kept coming up, so I couldn't resist.

The story opens on stage at a performance of King Lear as the lead actor Arthur Leander dies of a heart attack. A former member of the paparazzi, in training to be an EMT, tries unsuccessfully to perform CPR. When he leaves the theatre, he gets the unsettling news from a friend in a nearby hospital, that the flu reported in Russia has found its way via plane to Toronto. He stocks up on groceries and then heads to the high-rise apartment of his brother crippled during service in the Middle East.

Kirsten Raymond, a child actress playing one of Lear's daughter as a child who witnesses the death becomes a key character years later, as part of a traveling symphony going from town to town performing Shakespearean plays. The flu that wiped out over ninety percent of the world's population has left the survivors without electricity, once the power grid fails. Cars are abandoned after the gasoline supplies are exhausted, and planes  in the sky become just a distant memory.

The traveling performers find one of their regular stops  at St. Deborah-by-the-Woods, transformed eerily by the presence of a man calling himself The Prophet, spouting random verses from the book of Revelation, and seeking his next wife--usually a young girl. Escaping, the characters find themselves at an old airport where passengers on the last flight into the airport have set up camp and resumed their lives, including one survivor, a friend of the late Arthur Leander, who has set up a museum of artifacts of the former world.

Mandel moves the narrative back and forth between the past and present, revealing details of Leander's life, particularly of his failed marriages, and following his former wives and his only son, born to wife number 2, then returning to the post-disaster world.

Reading the account of the changed world, one can't help wondering if the existence of knowledge of a higher civilization wouldn't allow a more timely recovery of that lost world. That hope is reflected--just a glimmer--at the climax of the novel.

Some of the details of the flu outbreak remind me of my friend Alison Kemper's YA Zombie novel, Donna of the Dead--particularly the possibility of survivors, sailors at sea for instance, untouched by the disease. Having read plenty of accounts--both fiction and fact--about the Medieval plagues, I was intrigued too by the idea of people who are resistant to such disease and their potential for survivor's guilt.

The dramatic challenge of the characters as they learn to adapt to the post-flu world intrigued me--but I'm still not convinced to get my flu shot.

Emily St. John Mandel's Station 11: King Lear, Apocalypse, and the Georgia flu.