Tag Archives: Picador

Reviews: Exit Party

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Exit Party,
Emily St John Mandel,
Picador
Hardback, 320 Pages
ISBN: 9781035081288

Toronto Book Award and Arthur C Clarke Award winner, Emily St John Mandel returns, following her excellent Sea of Tranquillity (reviewed here), with a new novel Exit Party. As with Tranquillity, this narrative takes in different places and times, with different characters who are connected. Indeed the times, places and people are more connected than they can know at the start.

It’s the very near-future, and Ari has just been released from a long prison sentence, sharing an apartment in LA with her friend, Gloria. A civil war has just finished, and the US no longer really exists, having broken up into a series of competing regions, states and even city-states, with warring militias everywhere. Ari and Gloria are celebrating the end of the curfew and the removal of the last peacekeeper troops from the streets of the Californian Republic.

It’s at a party hosted by Kareem, a friend of Gloria’s, that Ari first starts to notice strange things – she’s always had a knack, an intuition of sorts for when something is about to happen or something peculiar is about, even when others don’t notice at first. In this case she observes a beautiful woman in a gorgeous dress, then later the same woman, now dressed down. At first she assumes she changed – perhaps she spilled something on her dress? But then she sees both women at the same time, something unusual happens to Gloria, and then Kareem vanishes. She sees him, goes to talk to him, but he’s gone from the room he entered, and she can’t see how he could have exited without her seeing him.

What begins as a gentle tug at her senses that something peculiar happened starts to build slowly, bit by bit, over the narrative. Ari’s intuition tells her when to move to another location to escape possible danger, and in this fragmented former US, danger is everywhere. She meets Nico in another city, who was also at that party, except she knew this woman under another name, but yes, this is the same person. Or is it? They talk warily and eventually Nico confesses she too saw odd things at the party, and confirms Kareem has never been seen since, and she confirms the double sightings of others, almost like there were two, slightly different versions of the same people. In fact Nico calls Ari “Ibari” when she first meets her, not a version of her name that Ari goes by, so she is puzzled how Nico would even know it.

As with Tranquillity, we move through different character perspectives, including “Ibari”, who is a federal officer, a kind of not so secret police officer in a US that didn’t disintegrate like Ari’s, but which is now a totalitarian regime, where children inform on their own parents (but hey, crime is low and the trains run on time!), a total opposite from Ari’s fractured, disintegrating US. We move through the characters and through the years, and as with her previous book, Mandel rather deftly takes all of these pieces of the puzzle, and arranged them, facet by facet, until we have the whole jewel, bringing all the connections together, each illuminating the other strands.

I don’t want to go into it any further because of possible spoilers, but suffice to say that as with Sea of Tranquillity, I found this not only an interesting narrative, but a beautiful bit of writing craft, to float various characters and spaces and times, then slowly bring them together; as with that previous book I found this highly satisfying.

Exit Party is published in Hardback by Picador/Macmillan on the 17th of September; this review was originally penned for The Shoreline of Infinity

If you are able, please support your local independent bookshop for purchases – if you don’t have one nearby, you can buy through Bookshop.org , and nominate a local bookshop, which will get a cut of the sale (to hell with Spamazon!)

Reviews: Sea of Tranquility

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Sea of Tranquillity,
Emily St, John Mandel,
Picador

Mandel, who won huge acclaim and the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award for Station Eleven (recently adapted into a TV series), returns with a fascinating take on the time travel tale. Taking us from the vast forests of British Columbia in 1912, where a young aristocrat, Edwin St. Andrew, has a strange, momentary audio-visual experience involving a glimpse of a building and violin music, a famous author, Olive Llewellyn, two centuries later, leaving her Lunar colony home for a book tour on Earth, with a new novel that includes a scene with a violin player in a huge airship terminal, but momentarily seeing huge trees, and further into the future, the unusually named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts (named by his mother for a character in Llewellyn’s novel), in an era where time travel exists but is understandably tightly controlled. Gaspery-Jacques is tasked with investigating a potential anomaly in different time periods, an anomaly involving violin music…

Mandel takes us chronologically through these different lives in different periods, introducing us to the different characters, giving us a glimpse of their lives, their worlds, and then deftly drawing them together, through the anomaly. Is it just a weird coincidence linking these disparate lives and time periods, or is there an actual fault in time itself – and if so, is it naturally occurring or the result of human interference? Or… could it be something else again? Gasper-Jacques’s sister, a physicist with the Time Institute has an interest in Simulation Theory, the idea that what we assume is the real universe around us is in fact an advanced computer simulation, that we are, in effect, all living in the Matrix. And perhaps this anomaly is a glitch in the Matrix?

The narrative manages to be both chronological yet circular, exploring the nature of this potential anomaly; I really am wary of saying too much because I don’t want to spoil it, and with all three segments being so interrelated it’s impossible to talk about certain events without massive spoilers. Suffice to say I found Mandel handled this rotation through the timelines and the various people in a very satisfying manner. The book also raises a lot of interesting questions – for instance, the few licensed to go back in time have a strict non-interference policy, like the temporal Prime Directive in Star Trek. Very sensible you may well think, protect the integrity of the timeline – after all, we can’t know what even minor alterations could have on the unfolding centuries of events that follow.

But, as Gaspery-Jacques is told in his training, when they visit a period, they know everything about most of the people they will encounter, their entire biographies. He could meet people at a party, for example, and know that one woman he is chatting to so amiably is destined to die soon, and not in an unavoidable way such as a fatal disease, but by a simple accident. Despite knowing this he absolutely could not tell her to avoid driving on that particular road next week. As his sister tells him, you effectively have to shut down your empathic, human side and remain totally detached; easier said than done. The issues raised by the possibility of Simulation Theory are likewise fascinating in their philosophical ramifications (I was reminded of the compelling documentary A Glitch in the Matrix which came out last year and explored this in some depth), both to the Big Questions of Life, The Universe And Everything, and the smaller, personal, individual elements (what would this mean for our lives, the lives of those we love?).

I can see this being a cracking read to do for my long-running book group, there’s a lot of questions and moral quandaries raised here that would be perfect for book group discussion material! Thought-provoking and very satisfying reading, I raced through this and couldn’t stop.

Sea of Tranquility is published late April 2022 by Picador

This review was originally penned for Shoreline of Infinity, Scotland’s leading journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy.