Sea of Tranquility

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022

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Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Part 8

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Character Analysis

Gaspery-Jacques Roberts

Gaspery is the central character in Sea of Tranquility. Mandel only uses the first person for his character, and he appears—as a time traveler—in all sections of the novel. Gaspery uses several disguises while time-traveling, including masquerading as a priest and claiming to be a journalist. A consistent clue to his use of facades is the motif of his accent being “off.” Mirella notes that he “seemed foreign in a way that she couldn’t quite parse” (49). His identity as a time traveler is hinted at but not fully revealed until the book reaches his time, 2401, in Part 4. At the end of the novel, Gaspery surgically changes his appearance and becomes Alan, the violinist, and triggers the anomaly—where moments in time bleed into one another.

He grew up in Night City, the second moon colony, near Olive’s house (200 years after her), and was named after a character in her book. He is initially listless and directionless. After he moves to Colony One, his sister (Zoey) tells him about the anomaly, and he becomes passionate about working for the Time Institute. Gaspery says, “[I]t’s the most interested I’ve been about anything in maybe my entire life” (138). However, after meeting Olive, he finds he cannot abide by the rules of the Time Institute and saves her life by telling her about her future. Despite being framed for a crime and imprisoned in Ohio, Gaspery believes his acts are moral, if not in accordance with the rules: “If someone’s about to drown, you have a duty to pull them from the water” (230), he says, comparing saving Olive from a pandemic (and saving Edwin from a psychiatric care facility) to saving someone from drowning.

Edwin St. John St. Andrew

Edwin’s “double-sainted name” (3) reflects the author’s name (Emily St. John Mandel). He is a “man of leisure through and through” (6) at the beginning of the novel. His parents “exile” (3) him, that is, send him to Canada from England for his anti-colonialist views. However, they give him money to live off of (a remittance), and he enjoys people-watching and learning how to draw. After he witnesses the anomaly—giving the reader his 1912 opinion of it, the first perspective of it in the novel—his life changes dramatically.

Edwin goes off to war after Gaspery interviews him. He loses his lover (another soldier), his foot, and his brothers in the war, and has what a modern audience would classify as PTSD: “He was a war hero but also something of an invalid” (217). Gaspery must intervene to keep Edwin from dying in a psychiatric care facility instead of at home. While Edwin does eventually die in the 1918 flu pandemic, Gaspery’s intervention improves his quality of life in those final days.

Olive Llewellyn

In 2203, Olive is a successful novelist, wife, and mother. Her book, Marienbad, is excerpted in Sea of Tranquility (and contains Gaspery’s namesake). The lecture about pandemics from her book tour is also included, broken up into small sections that are interspersed with descriptions of other moments from her travels. She writes and lectures about pandemics, and she also experiences one. The sections about her lockdown in Colony Two closely reflect the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown, a clear inspiration for Mandel. The pandemic endangering her life is what causes Gaspery to break the Time Institute’s rules—Olive is the catalyst for Gaspery’s transformation.

Olive spends much of her book tour homesick, missing Sylvie and Dion. However, being in lockdown gives her a new perspective: “when the world shrank to the size of the interior of the apartment, and to a population of three, the people were what she missed” (182). She wonders about the fates of the strangers she talked to across the Earth. Her opinions about Earth and the moon also change. She favors the natural beauty of Earth while on tour there. For instance, walking in Central Park “made [her] wish [she] could live on Earth” (67). However, by the end of the novel, she comes to appreciate the manufactured world inside the dome of Colony Two on the moon.

Mirella Kessler and Vincent Smith

These women live at the same time as the author, in the 2000s, and are grouped together in the titles of the parts that they appear in. They are connected through their husbands: Vincent’s husband involved Mirella’s husband (Faisal) in a Ponzi scheme, which eventually caused Faisal to take his own life. Ten years after Faisal’s death, Mirella’s new girlfriend (Laura) gives her a reason to think Vincent could be innocent after all, and Mirella seeks her out. This search leads to Mirella seeing the anomaly, as recorded by Vincent, and she learns of Vincent’s mysterious death at sea.

While Gaspery does not have to intervene to save Mirella’s life (she survives the COVID-19 pandemic without his help), Mirella witnesses a key moment in Gaspery’s future. Her childhood in Ohio includes seeing the moment when he is framed for murder by the Time Institute (but after the evidence of time travel is no longer under the overpass). She tells him, “I’ve seen you before [...] in Ohio” (53). This inverts the dynamic that Gaspery has with other characters: Rather than him revealing someone else’s future, Mirella reveals his future.

Vincent’s name could be a nod to the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whose family and friends called her Vincent and whose name is also “sainted” (3), like Edwin’s and Mandel’s. Vincent grew up in Caiette and is described as a “blue-haired waif” (210) when she sees the anomaly there. After her husband fled from prosecution for his crimes, Vincent changed her appearance dramatically, including cutting off her long hair. Mirella, briefly seeing her working at a New York City bar, considers this change part of a “disguise” (43), which contrasts with Gaspery’s disguises. Vincent was probably trying to avoid the people her husband swindled, while Gaspery was trying to hide his identity as a time traveler. Gaspery does not prevent her mysterious death, although Mirella notes that “drowning was the thing [Vincent] was most scared of” (51).