Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Has he had a fit? Or was this a supernatural event? He stumbles back to the beach, vomits, and encounters a mysterious priest who seems to come out of nowhere. There he has a strange experience in a forest in Caiette, where he seems to slip out of time, seeing a flash of darkness and a vast interior, with violin music playing against a background of incomprehensible noise.

Banished by his family for being outspokenly anti-Empire, he travels, with a contented lack of focus, to Canada and Vancouver Island. The story moves across several centuries, starting in 1912 with a remittance man, Edwin.

And, although it contains beautiful, hopeful passages, the novel has a rather fragmentary, shallow feel, perhaps because the leaps occasioned by time travel don’t allow for fully fleshed-out characters. You find yourself, sometimes, wanting the more robust underpinnings of her previous novels. Highly readable, quite short and told in Mandel’s customary delightful style, it’s full of compelling ideas – space colonisation and time travel, for example, and the simulation hypothesis (which is what it sounds like, that we’re living in a computerised simulation: some astrophysicists, as well as Elon Musk, apparently believe it’s feasible) – but addresses them too cursorily.

And several characters – Vincent, Mirella, and Jonathan Alkaitis, the Madoff-style Ponzi-scheme villain of the previous novel – all rear their heads, some of them, like Alkaitis, living in the alternative timelines posited in The Glass Hotel (he’s not in prison, he’s in a hotel in Dubai). In Sea of Tranquility, named after the 'silent flatlands' on the moon where the Apollo astronauts landed, the small settlement of Caiette on Vancouver Island is a crucial reference point from The Glass Hotel.

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel