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Emily St John Mandel: ‘Readers have tattoos from Station Eleven. It blows my mind’
The Canadian author on how her pandemic novel became a lockdown phenomenon and inspired a hit TV series
Two years ago, Emily St John Mandel was promoting The Glass Hotel, her fifth novel, when the pandemic broke out and the world shut down. It was a weird time for everyone, but for the 42-year-old novelist, whose previous book, Station Eleven, had imagined a post-apocalyptic world 20 years after a deadly pandemic killed 99% of the population, it was particularly strange. Nobody wanted to talk about The Glass Hotel. Instead, St John Mandel was feted as clairvoyant, asked to predict what might happen next, and invited, she says now, to “treat the pandemic as a way to sell copies of Station Eleven”. The novel itself, meanwhile, went from being simply a hit to the kind of book from which fans lift lines to have tattooed on their arms.
All of this, while alarming the author, also struck her as interesting at the narrative level. St John Mandel’s new novel, Sea of Tranquility, revisits aspects of her pandemic experience, although as one might imagine from a writer interested in building alternative worlds, not in a conventional style. So while the protagonist, Olive Llewellyn, is an author whose book tour is disrupted when a global pandemic, “Sars Twelve”, breaks out, the year is 2203 and all major cities in what was once the United States exist under climate-controlled domes. There are multiple colonies on the moon. St John Mandel also ranges back to 1912 and jumps ahead to 2401, and while portals for time travel and commuting by spaceship both feature, the most trenchant and mordantly funny parts of the novel involve all the ways in which, hundreds of years into the future, not much has changed. Whatever the date and the state of humanity, there will always be red velvet cupcakes, and misogyny.
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