Moments in time may feel special or stolen or far too fleeting. On occasion, a moment may be shared, whether it should ever have existed or not.
A memorable moment occurs in Emily St. John Mandel's latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, that reverberates through the years. The reader first experiences it in the story of the third son of an English aristocrat, sent in exile to Canada after speaking up a bit too forcefully at a dinner party about the rights of colonized people.
One day in a forest on remote Vancouver Island, Edwin finds a lone maple tree. Staring up into its branches, he hears violin music, a mechanical whoosh and has the impression he is in a huge building. Then he's back in the forest. The event haunts his life.
Decades later, a young teen strolls through the same forest and has the same experience. That teen is Vincent, first encountered in Mandel's The Glass Hotel. Her musical brother includes the video she shot during that experience in one of his compositions. The video is eventually seen by one of Vincent's closest friends, a woman deeply hurt by the fallout of crimes committed by Vincent's husband.
Sea of Tranquility switches the narrative focus several times, going through the centuries and spending time on both Earth and a colonized Moon. Pandemics come and go, are forgotten and have to be endured yet again. Another pandemic is coming as an author goes on a book tour 200 years in the future, leaving her Moon home and family to travel across Earth.
Like Mandel, Olive Llewellyn wrote a successful novel that included a pandemic and is frequently called upon to discuss that earlier novel. Olive is a voice that takes part in the narrative with the activities of her book tour. Olive also transcends the narrative with her ability to look dispassionately at the rise and fall of worldwide illness and to ache with every fiber of her being at being separated from her child and husband. The yearning in Olive becomes not an emotion of sorrow, but one that expresses the hopeful power of love.
And while the narrative hints at science fiction musings about time travel, simulations, bureaucracy and glitches in systems, the novel transcends those musings to uplift matters of the heart. Ultimately, Sea of Tranquility is a story of love in its many forms. It's a story about how love abides across the waves of time, and how love can be there, if not to fix everything, to at least make them more easy to bear.
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