In 2014, Emily St. John Mandel published Station Eleven, her bestselling novel about a pandemic. Which meant that in 2020, she acquired a peculiar sort of status as one of the ones who saw it coming, somehow; what Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson called one of the plague prophets.
Station Eleven wasn’t really about its pandemic, though; that was just the plot engine that got Mandel to her artsy post-apocalyptic world of traveling Shakespeare companies, beautifully rendered in the recent HBO Max TV adaptation. Mandel’s latest book, Sea of Tranquility, is a true pandemic novel. It exists to try to grapple with the world the Covid-19 pandemic made and what the pandemic taught us about reality. The results are lovely, life-affirming, and occasionally but unmistakably clumsy.
Sea of Tranquility also exists to play, metatextually, with what it was like to be Emily St. John Mandel in 2020. One of the central characters is Olive Llewellyn, an author in the 23rd century who lives on the moon and has found herself abruptly famous after her book about a fictional pandemic is a big hit. She’s on book tour — this section cheekily titled “The Last Book Tour on Earth” — when she finds herself caught up in another pandemic, this one real.
Abruptly, Olive’s universe narrows itself: long days indoors, trying to work while simultaneously educating her child from home, her book tour gone virtual. She finds herself delivering holographic lectures on the great uptick of interest in postapocalyptic literature over the past decade.
“So I’m guessing I’m not the first to ask you what it’s like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic,” one journalist remarks.
