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Emily St. John Mandel, author of “Station Eleven” and “The Glass Hotel,” likes to jump around chronologically in her novels. In the 23rd century, a mysterious organization tries to solve a 400-year-old problem.
In the year In 2403, time travel was discovered, and it was quickly banned, and is now under the strict control of the Time Institute, constantly scanning for past intruders (with the help of facial recognition software). After all, as one character says, “What is time travel if not a safety concern?”
There is a meaningful republic of Texas and a republic of the Atlantic, which is more surprising. The skies above Central Park are “crammed with low-altitude airships” and Earth’s three lunar colonies have man-made rivers for the mental health of residents. (“The Sea of Tranquility” is named after the “sea” on the moon where Apollo 11 landed.) Also, “Holographic assemblies were once hailed as the way of the future…but the reality was sadly flat.” Yes, people have complained about zoom meetings in the past.
The first point of landing A log camp on Vancouver Island before the Great War in 1912. Edwin St. Andrew passionately “exiled” from England about a devotee. He is precocious, aimless and homeless. One day he looks up into the branches of an old maple tree and has a strange and otherworldly feeling of being in a vast space, then a strange priest appears to them, appearing on different timelines and at different times. on the whole.
Mirella is a woman living in New York City in early 2020 trying to find her estranged friend Vincent. (Readers of “The Glass Hotel” may recognize these two characters.) Looking for a lead, she attends a show by Vincent’s stepbrother, Paul—”famous in a very limited way”—showing a video. A brief, confusing incident in the Canadian forest. Coincidentally, a month or so later she meets someone waiting for what will happen, and Vincent swears she’s known him since she was a child.
Gasperi is the unenlightened brother of scientist Zoe, who does something important and mysterious for the Time Institute. After years of training in history, culture, and dialect, the Institute sends an unlikely, sometimes “disturbingly mysterious” detective to find out why different people across time and space experience the same strange things.
Gasperi, well-meaning but decidedly not brilliant (he can never manage accents) is a fun choice for a provocateur, and his character development is satisfying. From Hale and Head, Mandel paints an impressive portrait of Edwin, a traumatized World War I veteran.
But the timeline that hurts the most is It’s the year 2202, and a novelist on a book tour is unknowingly approaching another terrible turning point in history. Olive Llewellyn lives in a lunar colony but has come to Earth to promote her novel “Marinbad” about an epidemic. (Mandel has a thing for plagues; her HBO miniseries “Station Eleven” was about a civilization-ending pandemic, and she began writing “The Sea” in March 2020 in the midst of the outbreak in Brooklyn.)
Olive’s story in particular demonstrates Mandel’s ability to create in the essential contingency of life. Olive is a fan of Mandel, who’s had bad experiences on her own book tours, though she’s polite and cheerful when I see her talk about her novel “Station Eleven” about the pandemic — a year before China gave us a taste of it. A real thing.
The emotional high points of “Sea” add to the comfort of the Olive on the road (or in a hovercraft), where a trusty suitcase can “be a friend”. Hotel was emptier than before.” Meanwhile, actual viral news is spreading.
During the last interview session on the tour, the weary author met a strange character from (wink) Contingency Magazine who once asked her if she had “experienced anything strange in the Oklahoma City airline terminal,” and then offered an interesting hypothesis of interesting import.
Your reviewer probably got an insight into the characters who are supposed to be in certain places at certain times without the writer’s thought: – A disinterested person suddenly desires a high-risk job. Another hangs in a hopeless place, as if waiting for something to happen. But “The Sea” has an eerie and fun feel to it, aside from the scattered, perhaps fateful drops of a terrifying universe.
One can get confused by pondering the questions posed by the Time Institute. Could this be a clue that we are living in a simulation? If so, how can we know for sure? Does this knowledge make our lives “real”? A character growing up in a lunar colony says, “I’ve always loved rain, and knowing it doesn’t come from clouds doesn’t make me love it.”
Mandel is a natural at indirect storytelling, a literary writer who eschews slippery, awkward phrases. She makes sure that getting to the point is not a sign of weakness or shyness.
“The Sea” ends with a surprising, yes, calm sort of calm as everything falls into place satisfactorily. Presumably a lot of index cards and strings were inserted to make the plot complex and easy to follow. The time stamps on the chapters are a godsend for people who are easily overwhelmed by time travel stories.
“Sea” is sadness without sadness. “Think civilization will last ten thousand years,” one character says pessimistically, “but the novel is completely taken for granted. People are still around and pushing forward, suffering from disease and climate problems and hardships but remaining as strong as ever.
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