gilda_elise

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal--an experience that shocks him to his core.

Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She's traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive's bestselling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him.

When Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, is hired to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness, he uncovers a series of lives upended: The exiled son of an earl driven to madness, a writer trapped far from home as a pandemic ravages Earth, and a childhood friend from the Night City who, like Gaspery himself, has glimpsed the chance to do something extraordinary that will disrupt the timeline of the universe.

A virtuoso performance that is as human and tender as it is intellectually playful, Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.

Mandel’s writing, the actual putting down of words, is always beautiful. There’s a lyrical quality to it that makes reading her stories a joy. But there has to be more to a book than that. The characters have to become real, so that I care what happens to them. In that regard, Mandel only got me part way.

I found the characters interesting, and I was glad at their outcomes. But only glad.

The story weaves through time, so the time spent with each character is limited, even if we get back to them eventually. I would start to feel a connection, and then the story would shift. At that point, I’d lose much of what I felt for the character.

Those, shifts, though, are intriguing, and kept me guessing. Maybe I should have seen the ending coming, but I didn’t. So in that regard, the book was a success. I may have wanted more, but what I got was almost enough.