“We knew it was coming…”
Aaa! Emily St. John Mandel (author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel) released another book months ago and I’m only just finding out about it now! Two days left to post a review before the end of 2022 so let’s do this really fast because omgyouguysthisbookisbeautiful.
We start with Edwin St. John St. Andrew, the auspiciously-named Brit banished to the colonies in 1912 for, well, being a mild embarrassment. More willing to people-watch than work, he’s almost ridiculously unprepared to be anything other than a second-born son living off his family’s stipend. Edwin’s travels across the wilds of Canada is setting up to be a story about coming of age and finding his true purpose….when he sees something impossible in the woods.
Bam! It’s the next chapter and we’re off to 2020 and Mirella, a woman who’s dealing with several different flavors of grief and regret as she watches an odd musical performance. Suddenly we’re dropped into 2203 with Olive Llewellyn as she tours to promote her latest book, counting down the days to when she can return to her home and family on the moon. And if that’s not far enough we end up in 2401 with a low-level hotel detective who finagles his way into working for a secret government agency that travels through time.
(Quick aside, I do love a good time-travel story, especially when it’s handled very matter-of-factly.. The how of time travel is a little hand-wavey here, but Mandel fills in the gaps by illustrating the dangers and the rules. There’s an element of time travel that I won’t go into detail about (spoilers) that’s incredibly damaging to the time traveler. I’m sure it’s mentioned in most time travel stories, but Mandel really focuses in on it here, and it gave me a sinking feeling to realize what’s really being asked of the traveler.)
Just like with Mandel’s previous books, the story jumps from place to place, person to person, time to time. Unconnected stories that somehow are connected. In many ways we know almost immediately what happens to them, how long they live, where they’ll die. But Mandel uses the entire novel to gradually tease out what it all means, most of which is left entirely up to the reader, or to the characters themselves.
One character who spends a lot of time trying to figure out they why of her current situation is Olive Llewellyn. I don’t think she’s quite an author-insert character, but Mandel does seem to have pulled from her own experiences when telling Olive’s story: the exhausting book tour, the demanding fans, the rude comments that are so embedded in our thinking that most people would struggle to understand why they’re rude at all. (Oh, a female author; you must be a children’s book writer! If you’re a mother then what are you doing away from your family? Your husband is obviously a wonderful person to take on your job of caring for your child. And since you agreed to be interviewed, I’ll ask you a kooky sex question that a male writer would never have to deal with. And so on, and so on.)
Probably the biggest connection between the two authors is how their previous best-sellers dealt with a theoretical pandemic that five years later has become anything but theoretical. And things do occasionally get a little meta. As Olive compares her book with the news about a distant epidemic (that’s mostly under control, and yet still a little concerning, possibly getting closer, all the while the reader is shouting at her to run! The monster’s right behind her!) she finds herself wondering why people need stories of the apocalypse. Is it because people are so despairing of how bad things get that they want to imagine the moment when it all finally stops? Do they picture themselves as the main character who survives the end of the world, transforming themselves and their entire lives to something new?
Or maybe it’s because the end of the world is always happening, and always will be.
“But all of this raises an interesting question,” Olive said. “What if it always is the end of the world?” She paused for effect. Before her, the holographic audience was almost perfectly still. “Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”
What links all the stories together isn’t just time travel, it’s the world ending. A pandemic, a new job, a loss of a spouse, leaving a continent, or finding out that you’ve lost your last chance to reconcile with an old friend, every day, every moment, someone’s world is ending in one way or another. Every one of us has hoped that we can get past something, get through the hard part until the crisis is over. But the fact is that the crisis doesn’t stop, not really. The history of existence is a series of world-endings that goes on forever.
And yes that’s… kind of horrible. Until you realize that every piece of literature, artwork, music, business, entire dazzling civilization or small happy family, everything that’s ever been, was created in the middle of the ongoing end of the world. Every moment of beauty – and this book has many of them – was created because whether someone has seventy years or a few more days, they lived.
Just something to keep in mind as we look forward to 2023. This book can be brutally tragic sometimes (the cause of wartime PTSD told in two short paragraphs was one of the more shocking sections), and there are some timey-wimey developments that some readers may think are a bit contrived but I thought were delightful. The whole novel was one of those where I just fell into each chapter and finished the whole thing in a matter of days. But it’s those lovely moments – contented solitude in Canada, a spaceship punching through the atmosphere like popping a soap bubble, artificial rain in a rundown moon colony that’s always been just home – that make me think about how, after a couple of very chaotic years with no end in sight, happiness occurs whenever we make it, instead of trying to wait for the latest crisis to be over.