In the years since I first recommended Emily St. John Mandel’s work, her novel “Station Eleven” became the 2015 One Read for Daniel Boone Regional Library and later an acclaimed limited series on HBOMax. Was my recommendation the catalyst for these successes? I’m told the answer is no. Even if this library’s blog posts aren’t influencing television productions, perhaps an HBO executive would still like to arrange for some sort of gift basket to be sent our way. It would be a nice thing to do. In return, I offer a recommendation for adaptation into a future acclaimed limited series: “Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel.
It’s a time travel novel in that the novel travels through time and so does a character. Among the settings are an island in Canada in 1912 and a colony on the moon in 2401. Both are interesting places inhabited by interesting characters, but only one of them is inhabited by an anomaly in space-time. The other one is inhabited by, among other things, a Time Institute that does time travel in order to make sure things go the way they think they are supposed to. Anyone familiar with time travel stories might spot a problem with their mission.
Mandel’s characters tend to resurface in different novels, but her novels tend to be set in different universes. For example, the flu that killed most of the population in “Station Eleven” was contained in the universe of her other novels, and some characters that succumbed to it get to keep on living in other works, such as “The Glass Hotel” and “Sea of Tranquility.” I love when novelists do this sort of thing. (See David Mitchell and Stephen King for two other creators of increasingly populated universes.)
You might not think a novel largely concerned with a man whose Ponzi scheme destroyed the financial lives of a bunch of people would be gorgeous and haunting, but that is an easy mistake to make. “The Glass Hotel” is, as NPR says “gorgeous and haunting, about the porous boundaries between past and present, the rich and the poor, and the realms of the living and the dead.” Someone else at NPR says, “a masterpiece, just as good — if not better — than its predecessor. It’s a stunning look at how people react to disasters, both small and large, and the temptation that some have to give up when faced with tragedy. As [Mandel] writes, ‘The problem with dropping out of the world is that the world moves on without you.'” The New Yorker had this cool thing to say: “This all-encompassing awareness of the mutability of life grows more pronounced as “The Glass Hotel” reaches its eerie sea change of an ending. In dramatizing so ingeniously how precarious and changeable everything is, Mandel’s novel is topical in a way she couldn’t have foreseen when she was writing it.”
As an act of good faith, prior to receiving even a single gift basket, I also offer “The Glass Hotel” as a recommendation to HBO for an acclaimed limited series.
I’ve just googled it and apparently HBO is adapting both of these novels. Rather than changing this blog post, I am just going to add the previous, current and next sentences. I will not rule out the possibility of HBO using a time machine to mine this library’s blog posts for recommendations for adaptations in order to weasel their way out of sending gift baskets.
