If you remember playing Trivial Pursuit, Emily St. John Mandel’s title, Sea of Tranquility, gives a hint that this is not an earthbound story. I remember the TP question which was to choose which sea out of four was farthest away. I soon learned the answer was Sea of Tranquility, located on the moon.
The beginning is earthly. A wayward English son has been exiled to Vancouver Island in 1912. While walking in the woods, he has an unsettling experience which is exacerbated when he meets someone he knows should not be there. Skipping ahead to 2020, a woman concerned that she has dropped an old friend unfairly spots someone from a disturbing childhood incident. In 2203, an author who lives on one of the domed moon colonies, writes about odd music and forest in an airport. In 2401, physicists who specialize in time travel, worry about an anomaly that seems very much like corruption of a computer program.
The first stories with their hints of otherworldly mystery are compelling. We begin to realize the same character appears in all the sections which span several hundred years. There is concern for social justice, choosing the moral path, finding peace, speculation on the impartiality of disease.
But the book travels to an obscure ending where people worry that they are living in a computer simulation (which implies a programmer). I can’t see why the author presents this idea as disturbing. Hasn’t humanity been saying for centuries that God has a plan? It sounds like the same familiar concept to me, just updated language.
Every once in a while this happens. Such a good story, but it falls flat at the end.
Hamish Macbeth, a young man then, first appeared in the 1980’s. Now forty years and thirty plus mysteries later, he is not more than a few years older. We should all be so fortunate. Handsome and independent minded, he stars once again in M. C. Beaton’s “Death of a…” series, this time Death of a Traitor.
As a constable in the fictional town of Lochdubh in the real Sutherland County on the west coast of Scotland, he enjoys the beauty of the rugged Highlands, refusing any idea of promotion to a larger town. Not that he isn’t able. His wily Scottish intuition is more than a match for the criminals he encounters. In this most recent mystery, published in 2023, Hamish tracks down the killer of a blackmailer, learning the varied secrets of the Highland neighbors on his beat.
M. C. Beaton, the prolific author of this and the popular Agatha Raisin series, died in 2019. At the end of her life she started to work with R. W. Green who is continuing to write the two series, both of which list the two of them as authors. Death of a Traitor is a fun and seamless transition.
For those in need of a pick-me-up during these hot dry August days, I suggest a NYT article about a library celebration in Maine. No beach or park for these patrons.
No, they have chosen instead to go to the library, to listen to a reading of Robert McCloskey’s children’s books and see an exhibit of his original drawings. It helped that the reader was McCloskey’s daughter, and the library is in Maine where he lived. Remember Make Way for Ducklings? or Time of Wonder?
This excellent article illustrates the lasting impact of good children’s literature, not only on the children who listen, but also on the adults who read it.
I like the last words of The Time of Wonder when summer is ending and it is time to go home. The author describes the feeling as “a little bit sad about the place you are leaving, but a little bit glad about the place you are going.” Such an apt description of an emotion that is a large part of life.
You can find this charming nostalgic piece, “One Morning in Maine,” by Elisabeth Egan, in the New York Times, August 25.
Here is the Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in Boston Public Garden where the chapeaux change according to the season and climate. Let’s hope the need for pink hats is a piece of nostalgia that stays in the past.
Along the lines of the pink hat sentiment is this great quote from Matt Bai in the Washington Post, August 17. “Asking Donald Trump to pledge loyalty to anything really, other than himself, is like asking my dog to write a novel. She might look at you like she understands the concept, but trust me, she doesn’t.”
