I have ambivalent feelings about this novel. On the one hand, when critics treat Emily St. John Mandel as a literary novelist, I think she’s out of her depth. When her novel, The Glass Hotel, was nominated for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize, I observed that it was conspicuous amongst the nominees as the one novel which really didn’t merit it. On the other hand, when they treat her as a genre novelist, I think this is precisely the kind of writing I crave. I recall my earlier encounter with William Gibson’s The Peripheral, ostensibly science fiction, immensely popular; yet, in my estimation, unreadable. Whatever Gibson’s faults, St. John Mandel is the answer. She writes consistently well, a smooth prose stylist who carries the reader easily along. She has a visual imagination which comes to the fore in her descriptive passages. And she structures her tale so that it draws to a taut close.
The novel opens in 1912 with Edwin St. John St. Andrew (the name is perhaps a bit of a joke at the author’s expense), born to a wealthy English family, but exiled to the colonies. Finding himself in Victoria, he drifts up island to a small settlement that supports a cannery and logging camp. One day he ventures into a forest where he finds a broad and ancient maple in a clearing and meets a priest there. The priest disappears into the brush and he hears a melody played on a violin, a hydraulic whoosh, and thinks he has a glimpse of a vast interior space. Call it an intimation of alterity, if you like.
We move to 2020 and a section titled “Mirella and Vincent”. We’ve met Vincent before, from Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel. There, Vincent was in a show marriage with a man named Jonathan Alkaitis, a Bernie Madoff figure who ran a ponzi scheme that bilked naive investors of billions of dollars. One of those investors was Faisal who lost everything and committed suicide, leaving behind his wife, Mirella. In The Glass Hotel, we also learned that Vincent went everywhere with a video camera. Her brother, Paul, is a composer and he has incorporated one of Vincent’s recordings in one of his works. It is a scene in a forest clearing beneath the canopy of a large maple. Then we have the same intimation of alterity we first encountered more than a hundred years earlier.
Following the premiere of Paul’s work, Mirella meets him at the stage door and they are intercepted by a man named Gaspery Roberts who bears a remarkable resemblance to the priest we met in the previous section. There is an awkward exchange when Gaspery insists on using sanitizer before shaking Paul’s hand and mutters comments about fomites and Covid-19 and Wuhan until he recalls that it’s January, 2020 and these people have no idea what he’s talking about. This is our first intimation that we’re in a time travel novel and Gaspery hails from the future, dickering in the past for reasons we don’t yet understand.
The novel’s third section jumps ahead through time to the year 2203 and follows Olive Llewellyn on her so-called “Last Book Tour on Earth.” Although Olive makes her home on Colony Two on the Moon, we meet her on tour in Manhattan, promoting her latest novel, Marienbad which concerns a pandemic. While on her way from her latest book signing to her hotel, the cab driver asks if Olive has heard news of an outbreak in Australia. It seems her novel is a little too prescient.
The fourth section takes us to the farthest temporal reaches of the novel: the year 2401. Gaspery narrates this section and tells how he has grown up on the moon’s Colony Two, now called Night City because the lights have failed. He used to walk to school past the childhood home of the famous writer, Olive Llewellyn, with its commemorative plaque. He had a classmate who lived there, a girl named Talia, who vanished from his life until, years later, he took a job working security at the Grand Luna Hotel on Colony One and found that she was also employed there. Gaspery’s sister, Zoey, works at the Time Institute and has asked him to meet her at her office. There, she plays a video sent to her by a colleague, a recording of a performance by a 21st century composer named Paul Smith. Within the recording is the image of a video screen on which we see another recording: that intimation of alterity which has become so familiar. Zoey then turns to Olive Llewellyn’s novel, Marienbad, and just as we have witnessed a video within a video, now we read a novel within a novel, or at least a passage from that novel. The passage recounts the very intimation we have witnessed in the video. As they say in TV sales pitches: but wait, there’s more. Zoey trots out a letter dated 1912 and written by a man named Edwin who attests to the same experience.
Zoey on behalf of the Temporal Institute has diagnosed a temporal leakage: an event in one time period dribbles into another time period. Had this been a sci-fi novel from the 60s, Zoey might have called the leakage a tear in the temporal fabric or a spacetime rift, but living as we do in the age of Elon Musk and VR goggles and the Simulation Hypothesis, Zoey diagnoses the problem as a corrupt file. By implication, the universe is a grand algorithm and there’s a glitch in the code. Zoey has invited Gaspery to the Time Institute from an ulterior motive: she means to recruit him and then send him on a mission to the three prior points in time, the points of leakage, and repair the corrupt file.
And so the novel spools itself out in reverse order, returning first to the year 2203 and Olive Llewellyn’s Last Book Tour on Earth. However, Gaspery breaches protocol and interferes. From his privileged position in the 25th century, he can see well enough that a pandemic is about to sweep the planet Earth at the beginning of the 23rd century, and it’s a small thing for him to advise a sole woman that it would be in her interest to cut short her book tour and return to her home on Colony Two. So she does, and so she survives with her family in lockdown on their lunar home. The concern, of course, is that Gaspery’s compassion for a sole woman may have compromised his mission to repair a glitch that might save untold billions. But isn’t that always the way it goes with time travel?
Enough of the plot. Any more would require a spoiler alert. Instead, I close by considering a couple more general matters. The first relates to a feature of the genre. Not just science fiction, this is time travelling science fiction and there’s something about the use of time travel in fiction that lends itself to nostalgia and sentiment. The paradigm, I suppose, is the “The City on the Edge of Forever” in the original Star Trek series. McCoy goes nuts and leaps through a time portal. Kirk and Spock chase after him and find themselves in depression era New York City. Like a fool, Kirk falls for a woman named Edith Keeler (Joan Collins) and risks breaching the prime directive by interfering with the local situation. Although Kirk’s interference would save Keeler from a fatal car accident, it would also divert Earth to an alternate time line in which Nazis dominate the globe. And so Kirk must make the tragic choice for the good of all humanity and allow Edith Keeler to die in her car accident.
Part of the episode’s appeal is that it places viewers in a privileged position. We share with the crew of the Enterprise a knowledge about the future towards which the 1930s characters are hurtling. It feeds our need to feel superior. And it feeds the illusion that we are in control of our destiny. By a syllogistic reasoning, we stand in relation to our past as our future selves stand in relation to us. We have a certain knowledge of how past events play out in our present day, and that certainty is a comfort. Although we might feel anxious about the future, we can use this syllogism to infer that our future selves will have a similar feeling of comfort as they look back upon our present moment and see how that plays out in their future. The future is not an unknown to the people living in it.
Related to this is a patronizing attitude most people bring to bear upon the past. The world has grown exponentially more complicated and so it is a given that life in the past was simpler. If we could travel backwards through time, it might feel like a return to Eden. We look at our forebears and remark that they might have complained less about their lot in life if they could have seen what was coming. Paradoxically, we also impose stringent demands on the past. We see this at work especially for our cultural and political heroes, the ones we memorialize in bronze statues and national myths. If they fail to live up to the present day standards of social awareness, we savage them. They disappoint us by being creatures of their time and lacking the prescience to anticipate what was yet to come.
The second general matter I want to consider is the question of writing fiction about the Covid-19 pandemic. I’m curious to see how our literary life plays out in the near term. Will writers treat Covid-19 as an incidental blip they briefly acknowledge before getting on with the business of doing whatever they were doing in 2019, writing about relationships or jewel heists or sex with aliens? Or will writers treat Covid-19 more like a layer of sediment laid down in the permanent geologic record of our collective literary experience? The closest analog I can think of is the effect of 9/11 on the American literary landscape. 9/11 lies like a geologic striation. If you read American novels from the 1990s, it’s a little like digging into the effluvial muck. Or time travel to a simpler age. We read Steinbeck or Faulkner with our sentiment intact and our patronizing souls keyed to the fact that these writers lived in a time that was easier to parse. Meanwhile, writers who straddle the 9/11 fault line import into their work a sensibility that is absent from those who went before. Even when they don’t mention the twin towers, we still feel their collapse lurking in the background as part of a cultural burden the American writer is required to bear.
Will something similar happen more generally as we come to terms with the pandemic experience? To date, I’ve encountered a few novelists who are explicit in their treatment of the pandemic. In The Fell, Sarah Moss tells the story of a woman who breaches a stay-at-home order. The fourth volume of Ali Smith’s seasonal tetralogy, Summer, alludes to the pandemic. And her subsequent novel, Companion Piece, gives even more space to the pandemic. There are a few others, too: Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars and Clare Pollard’s Delphi. At the same time, I have encountered a spate of recently published novels in which the global pandemic is conspicuously absent. Some of these works don’t even make the global pandemic felt, not in the way 9/11 makes itself felt even in American fiction where it has no obvious place.
There may be a huge difference in the way we choose to carry the cultural memory of Covid-19 when set against the way we memorialize acts of violence. We can explain acts of violence, or at least point to perpetrators. We can assign blame and exact retribution. If we want, we can even answer violence with violence. But when it comes to pathogens, the assignment of blame is more challenging. The task can veer off into conspiracy theory: malicious lab workers deliberately leaked fabricated germs into the world. Or it can thrust us into the arcane discipline of theodicy: how can a benevolent god allow bad things to happen to good people? Neither approach sits well with the prevailing mainstream’s adherence to a scientific rationalism which, except for therapy-speak, has little to say about how we should feel as survivors of a global pandemic. The arts could help us here, but do we want that help? It’s just as likely that we will sweep the matter under the carpet and carry on as if nothing happened, pleading that we are tired of it, or pleading that novels about the pandemic will only retraumatize us.
In the grand sweep of post-pandemic writing, Emily St. John Mandel’s novel will prove an early foray into uncharted literary terrain. It represents a huge risk and, for that reason alone, deserves our admiration. However, my suspicion is that, at least in the short term, readers will be happy to pretend the pandemic never happened. I base that suspicion on my observation of attitudes towards masking, indoor gathering, and booster vaccinations. Although the WHO and local public health authorities assure us in mid-2023 that Covid-19 is far from over, we behave as if it is. We have had enough of the pandemic and want to get on with things. As readers, we want to get back to our stories of relationships and jewel heists and sex with aliens.
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