Corona novel: Back to lockdown

For the successful Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, pandemics are a recurring theme in her novels. Her 2014 novel “Station Eleven” (in German translation “The Light of the Last Days”), which was filmed as a series by HBO and broadcast in the middle of the Corona lockdown, was about a post-apocalyptic world after a pandemic where a troupe of actors parade through the North American pampas with Shakespeare plays.

Her new novel “The Sea of ​​Endless Tranquility” is about several pandemics between the 20th and 23rd centuries: from the Spanish flu to an Ebola outbreak and the start of Covid19 in 2020 to a Sars outbreak. Disease that afflicts the earth and also the colonies on the moon. It turns out that this future pandemic will not be much different for the people living in a domed city on the moon at the beginning of the 23rd century than what we just experienced with Corona. The lockdown imposed on them sounds familiar. At first it’s a huge shock for everyone, then everything is reflexively disinfected, the children are picked up from school, there is homeschooling, food is hoarded and instead of holding meetings via Zoom or Teams, in this future there will be holographic rooms in which one of the main characters, the writer Olive Llewellyn, then gives her readings.

The novel, which is just under 300 pages long, is set in four different time levels and unfolds future worlds that are staged in great detail and are narratively connected by the pandemics. In 1912, a young English nobleman, who was thrown out of his house by his parents because of his erratic lifestyle, travels to the Canadian provinces, where he makes an incredible discovery. Two women who are in New York at the beginning of the corona pandemic in early 2020 live through a dramatic story about lost fortune and destroyed families. Two hundred years later, moon-born writer Olive Llewellyn publishes a novel about a pandemic just before another one breaks out, leaving her stranded on a book tour in New York while her husband and daughter wait for her in the lunar colony. And another 200 years in the future, the young Gaspery-Jacques begins his training in another lunar colony at a time institute that sends its employees on missions into the past.

The extraordinary thing about this prose is Emily St. John Mandel’s ability to use short sentences and minimalist descriptions to design entire future worlds that still seem incredibly coherent. Sometimes huge airships fly through the sky, then artificial atmospheres enable life in space colonies, whose everyday life is told very vividly, and then there is a mysterious man who keeps appearing in different time levels.

Emily St. John Mandel’s language style is simple, but extremely concise and very emotional. Their future worlds on Earth, the Moon and in the “Far Colonies” are far less dystopian or utopian-perfect than is usual in such genre stories. The earth has experienced dramatic changes, there have been floods and droughts, and entire areas of land have been depopulated. But humanity has come to terms with the changes, continues to live in large, often domed cities because the air is too toxic, and has new technologies to survive instead of eking out a post-apocalyptic existence.

Time travel ultimately becomes the actual narrative subject of this extraordinary novel, the plot of which folds around its own axis, so to speak. Because as it turns out, there’s a place in a forest on the Canadian coast where different timelines overlap. But how is that possible? Could the whole world possibly just be a simulation with corrupted files? If so, what follows from that? This theory soon emerges and is heatedly discussed, including by the time traveler Gaspery-Jacques together with his sister Zoey, who also sets off into the past to at least get closer to solving this mystery. At the end, this novel, which artfully meanders through five centuries, comes up with a surprising solution.

Emily St. John Mandel: The sea of ​​endless calm. Ad America. English v. Bernhard Robben, Ullstein-Verlag, 288 pp., b. €22.99.

#ndstays – Get active and order a promotional package

Regardless of whether it is pubs, cafés, festivals or other meeting places – we want to become more visible and reach everyone who values ​​independent journalism with an attitude. We have put together a campaign package with stickers, flyers, posters and buttons that you can use to get active and support your newspaper.
To the promotional package