"Sea of Tranquillity" by Emily St John Mandel

 Strange happenings suggest that what we perceive as reality, including ourselves, might be a simulation. So the Time Institute sends a time traveller to investigate. 

As is usual with this sort of fiction, it is more interesting when the reader is still in the dark as to what has happened: monsters are always scarier before they are seen. But there are several appealing characters and the plot has a clever twist towards the end.

Mandel is best known for Station Eleven, a novel set in a post-pandemic world, presciently written pre-Covid. (This book also involves a pandemic.) As with that book, the plot is somewhat contrived, with key questions unasked (such as, if we are in a simulation, who is writing the program? and why? and how can they cope with all that information? and are they in a simulation themselves?) but the characters are strong.

But I do wish that authors wouldn't write about authors. It seems like cheating. I know they say 'write what you know' but shouldn't you also write characters that resonate with your readers?

The first section is written in the present tense; the past tense is used in most of the other parts. A first-person narrative is used for Gaspery's sections; otherwise the narratives are third-person but written from the perspective of the principal character.

It was a pleasant and easy read but I doubt it will linger in my mind.

Selected quotes:

• "Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin." (Remittance: 4)
• "This place is utterly neutral on whether he lives or dies." (Remittance: 7)
• "A man who works long hours can hide anything." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Mirella wore a great deal of make-up at work, and when she was tired in the afternoons, sometimes her face felt heavy." (Mirella and Vincent: 1)
• "Sometimes order can be relentless." (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "What is time travel if not a security problem?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Doesn't everything seem obvious in retrospect?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "Won't most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of others?" (Last Book Tour on Earth: 1)
• "The traveller's presence itself is a disruption." (Bad Chickens: 7)
• "As a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world." (Last Book Tour on Earth: reprise)
• "His heart flapped deathlessly." (Remittance 1918, 1990, 2008)

December 2023; 255 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God