Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel’s sixth novel, Sea of Tranquility, is graced with an idyllic title, but her apocalyptic work is far from peaceful. Her complex characters grapple with rumors of plague—and the reality of it—along with the aloneness of being human in derelict worlds of past and present.
Mandel, born in 1979 in Comox, British Columbia, Canada, was raised on the scenic Denman Island off of Vancouver Island. In this crucible of nature, she was homeschooled until fifteen years old, and then left high school at the age of eighteen to attend the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Mandel currently lives in New York City with her husband and daughter.
In 2009, Mandel published her first novel, Last Night in Montreal, and then in 2010, released The Singer’s Gun, followed by The Lola Quartet in 2012. Mandel’s breakout moment came when her fourth novel, Station Eleven (published in 2014), won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award. In addition, Station Eleven was shortlisted for the National Book Award and nominated for both the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The novel has been translated into 31 languages—and put Mandel firmly on the international literary scene.
Loosely based on Bernie Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scheme, Mandel published The Glass Hotel in 2020, in which her character, Jonathon Alkaitis, takes the reader along a tale of infamy, where deceit rips through the innocent and the gullible, their lives destroyed by insatiable greed. A line from the novel, “Money is its own country,” underlines the credence and allowance of our society to grant the rich—the aristocracy of the new world order—their own laws independent of those beneath them. And then the phrase, “Why don’t you swallow broken glass,” is mysteriously etched on a windowpane of the isolated Hotel Caiette, owned by Alkaitis, illustrating the paradox of having it all and yet having nothing. The novel was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and in 2019, NBC Universal International Studios acquired the rights to turn the story into a TV series.
In her upcoming novel, Sea of Tranquility, Mandel strums our instinctual human anxieties, interweaving disparate stories on warped and tangled strands of time. The character Edward muses in his exile to British Columbia, that, “This place is utterly neutral on the question of whether he lives or dies … it doesn’t care about his last name or where he went to school,” underlining that Nature is indifferent to us—we either eat or are eaten—a zero-sum game to the universe. In the timeline of one character, author Olive Llewellyn, a pandemic hits, crashing onto lives who’ve denied their vulnerability or refused to believe the apocalypse had finally arrived—until the final capitulation of acknowledgement, “We knew it was coming.”
Mandel’s flawed characters are expertly choreographed through centuries of time and space, human beings who are simply trying to live their lives in a complex and chaotic world. Perhaps her character, Gaspery, in Sea of Tranquility says it best, describing life on the edge: “A whiff of disorder that I found invigorating.”
Karen (K.E.) Lanning www.kelanning.com , author of the cli-fi series, The Melt Trilogy: A Spider Sat Beside Her, The Sting of the Bee, and Listen to the Birds, and currently writing two commercial literary novels: Where the Sky Meets the Earth and The Light of the Sun.
Author K.E. Lanning, photo credit V Paulk