Sea of Tranquility

Mandel is here expanding her literary universe, plucking characters from her last book, The Glass Hotel, and mining her own experience on tour promoting her world-ending pandemic book Station Eleven. Here in Sea of Tranquility, Olive Llewellyn is touring her wildly successful post-apocalyptic novel and finding herself thinking about how end-of-the-world literature could be born from our current state of economic inequality. In a world that seems fundamentally unfair, perhaps we long to just blow everything up and start over. Or maybe it's based on a longing for heroism. That should the unthinkable happen, we might find ourselves remade into better, more heroic people. Or maybe we just want to imagine a future with less technology in it. Whatever it might be, Mandel muses here that “no star burns forever.”

The book slips from timelines and perspectives over a span of 600 years from a British dandy Edwin St. John St. Andrew arriving in Canada in 1912 to take a run at something, anything really — to a disaffected hotel worker on a moon colony in 2401. Along the way Mandel leaves tiny breadcrumbs across the years and on the page while managing to bring it all together in a melancholic, yet satisfying way.

Mandel I find has a soothing light touch. The writing never really blows my hair back but I enjoy the ride nonetheless. It's literary chill-hop, the perfect bookish vibe.

Finally, I have to mention my favourite anecdote, captured here on the page, based on an experience Mandel had at a literary festival in 2015 with American poet Kay Ryan. Ryan called attention to the phrase “The chickens are coming home to roost...“

“Because it's never good chickens. It's never ‘You've been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.' It's never good chickens. It's always bad chickens.”

And now I can't stop thinking about those bad chickens.