Sea of Tranquility and When They Lost Their Heads

I review two novels by current Canadian literary stars Emily St. John Mandel and Heather O'Neill. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel is a science fiction novel about art, time, travel, love and plague that takes readers from 1912 Vancouver Island to a dark colony of the moon 500 years later. The author also incorporates references to her earlier award-winning novels Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel.

When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill is a historical fiction, satirical novel about 19th-century Montreal. It takes readers into the brutality of factory life and the opulent lives of Montreal’s wealthy while exploring sex, desire and class.

Books and Resources Discussed:

Significant Others, podcast
Borgen, Netflix
Dicte, Prime Video
Sea Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven, HBO
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
Heavenly Creatures, movie (1994)
The Virgin Cure by Ami McKay

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Transcript

Unknown: 0:11

Hello, welcome back to the Red Fern book review. I am your host, Amy Mair. And today, we're going to look at a pair of young authors. While they're younger than me anyway. They're Canadian. They're both women. And they both had great success with previous works. And what I did was I picked up both these books simply because of author recognition. I think I'm probably similar to a lot of you, and not because of the topic of the books themselves. And those books are the Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel. And When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O'Neill, but before we get to the books, I would like to talk with you with a few things that I'm listening and watching. So the first thing I want to talk about comes from a listener. And that listener is Sherry. Thanks Sherry so much. And it's a podcast called significant others. And this is a fantastic podcast, for those of you who are history buffs. And it is by Liza Powell O'Brien, who is better known as Conan O'Brien, his wife. Now, I didn't really know anything about her, except that she was beautiful, because I've seen pictures of her. But it turns out, she's also smart. And what she's done is she's she's created a podcast looking at the lives of very famous men, and the women that were behind them. And the quote, kind of the tagline to the podcast is, because no one lives in a vacuum, not even geniuses. And she looks at she takes a look at very famous people, including Gandhi's wife Kasturba, she looks at Tolstoy's wife counters, Sophia. And then she looks at people they might not have had a romantic relationship, but they were kind of a muse of the other. So she looks at Maya Angelou and her relationship with James Baldwin. And so, this book is this book, this podcast is great. And it looks at the profound impact that these women had on the men in their lives from the counsel they gave them to the sharing of ideas, and the caring that they did you know, whether it's even just making them meals, allowing them the freedom to go out and do the things that they were going to do. And it's super well researched. And then to make it even more fun. Conan drops in on occasion and gives his thoughts. And we learn a few things about him, including that he has a whole bookcase devoted to Lincoln, he's super obsessed with Lincoln. And he is a super big history nerd, and likes to take his wife to go stand in fields where a battle might have taken place many years ago, but there's nothing there but a field and he's willing to draw drive hundreds of miles just to see that. So what I would suggest is if you drop in on this podcast, I would first check out the episode on Mary Todd Lincoln. And I found that fascinating. She has long been a figure that has been discussed, and not very respected. She's considered crazy. She may be crazy. But there's no doubt that she had a huge impact on Lincoln. And there's some speculation that maybe Lincoln wouldn't even be president if it wasn't for her. So check that out. And the next thing I want to mention is I have gone back and I've been watching a really great Danish political drama borgan. You've probably seen it if you watch Netflix, you've seen it advertised, you may have even seen it. And I think it's getting a lot of play right now. Because there were three seasons it came out originally in 2010. But there's now a fourth season so they're going back and showing all the episodes and it's been likened to a Danish house of cards or a bleaker Nordic West Wing, not to the New York Times called is it? I really like it. Borgen means castle, and it's the informal name for the Christian Borg palace where all three branches of the Danish government reside. And it's, it's great. And I know it's a lot to ask you to listen to subtitles or read them but I think this was worth it. And it doesn't take long for the subtitles to kind of melt away and to to get really absorbed. And it features, the main character is a female prime minister. So that's really great. And it also reminded me literally, I was watching it and a couple of the characters are in another Danish show that I really liked called dictate. Maybe there's not a lot of actors in Copenhagen, it's it is a smaller town. But two, there's two wonderful male actors that are also leads in this show, and dictators about a female crime reporter with a messy personal life. And I love that kind of that genre. And another while you're at it, there's another Danish show you could watch called the killing. I've actually seen the American version that was filmed in Vancouver, and it's another police procedural drama. So check those out. Okay, let's get to the books. So the first book we're going to talk about is the Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel. And I have to say, this author is having her moment. She released the glass hotel in 2020, just as the pandemic was starting. And it just so happens that she wrote a really fantastic book called station 11, about a pandemic very much. I mean, it's a dystopian pandemic. But it's unbelievable and eerie, how there's some parallels to the pandemic that we're going through or have gone through. And so a little bit about Emily, she was raised on Denman Island, and other remote parts of Vancouver Island, and she was homeschooled. And for those of you from British Columbia, you will understand that means she essentially lived off the grid. And so that makes a lot of sense. When you see one of the big themes in her work is the natural world, specifically British Columbia and the Canadian wilderness. So she knew that firsthand, she said in things that I've read about her that on Denman Island, there was more deer than people. At 18, she moved to Toronto to study contemporary dance, and eventually ended up in New York City. And she's also a staff writer for the literary arts and culture man called the millions, and I was just checking it out in prep for this podcast, and then you should look at it, I've just, I've just decided to subscribe to that as well. Okay, so a little bit about her themes. So before we get into the books themselves, so Emily is obsessed with chips and water, and that features in all of her books. And the reason why it's kind of interesting. So think about I live in Vancouver, and you can look out on the water and see these giant tankers laden with giant containers. And, really, I don't think about it too much. They're around all the time. But that's kind of her point. She says, What fascinates her about shipping is that nowadays, I mean, they used to when a ship would come to port, you know, everyone would know, and it was a big deal. Now, there's so vast and so large, but they're also very mysterious. So they're kind of invisible in a way. And also the things that happen on them. If something criminal were to happen, and you're out at sea, she considers it like the Wild West, like who's in charge of that? Who would deal with that? So an almost all the goods or the end things we have, at some point touched a container ship, or many of them dead. So she's just really fascinated with that. She's fascinated with time travel. She's fascinated with science fiction and speculative fiction. And very much like Jennifer Egan, she plays with kind of coming in and out of different periods in time and kind of sluicing through the world not just seeing things in chronological order. So okay, so let's talk a little bit about her books. So she wrote three books, but we're not going to talk about those before she really hit everyone's radar. And then she wrote station 11. And interestingly enough, I read that she was influenced by David Mitchell, who wrote a wonderful puzzle book called Cloud Atlas, which some of you are going to know. And station 11, or was where Mandel made her mark, and it's a post apocalyptic novel, and it's set in the near future, and it's about a virus and how a group of Shakespearean actors end up traveling from town to town and the grid Great Lakes region. And it's caught this kind of weird Walking Dead VODs. And also, I just was amazed at the very beginning of the book. It reminds me so much of how we all felt in 2020, when we were kinda like, thinking about traveling and still not wanting to believe that things life was getting shut down. And it's just amazing how she foresaw this event in some ways. So this show, or this book, is also a show on HBO max. So if anyone's seen that, let me know because I'd like to know if that's worth watching. So the next book that came out in 2020, is the gloss Hotel. That is a really cool book. It's similar in vibe to the station 11. And it is a mystery thriller. And it involves British Columbia as well. And it's about a woman named Vincent, who's in remote resort town with this unbelievable hotel glass hotel, we're very famous people come. And she works there as a staff member, and she's plucked out of obscurity, picked up by this guy, who is a Bernie Madoff character. And this book is heavily kind of influenced by Bernie Madoff. And she's taken back back east to the East Coast, United States and starts to live this kind of fabulous life, which is actually not so fabulous because of its incredibly corrupt and dangerous. So there's that. So then that brings us to the Sea of Tranquility. This is her sixth novel, and how to describe this book, I'm going to just try to describe this without giving too much away. So this book is about art time, love, and the pandemic. She wrote this actually during the pandemic. And it's really interesting, because she's referring to the pandemic, it's almost like life meets art. So this book starts out on Vancouver Island, and 2012 or 1912. And there's a character named Edwin St. John St. Andrew, and he's 18 years old. And he's been exiled by his aristocratic family, after he freaks out with a political diatribe at a family dinner. So not a very big transgression, a lot of us might be exiled by our families, if we had, if this were the bar that he sent to the Canadian wilderness. And actually, he is set in the same mythical town where the glass hotel is set to so called kayak. So I'll talk about that. And that connection in a little bit. But what happens is he's wandering in this gorgeous forest, and he hears the violin echoing and an airship terminal, which of course, we know, at this time, there is no airship terminal in his world, but that's what he's hearing. And then there's a giant flash. And then two centuries later, the book kind of zips over to a different time period. There's a famous writer named all of Llewellyn, which it's very clear, is actually Emily St. John Mandel herself. And this writer is on a book tour. And she lives in a world where people live on the moon and on Earth. And this writer lives on the moon, but has come down to earth to do her book tour, and did a die. There's a passage in her novel about a man playing the violin for spare change, an echoing corridor of an airship terminal surrounded by the forest. So this is two centuries later. And then there's even a third character. And this is Gasperi. Roberts, and he is a detective in the far distant future. And he lives on the moon and a place called the knight city. And he time travels. And he's been hired to investigate the anomaly between this anomaly about these two events. So I will leave that with plot there and just talk a little bit more about some general themes. So what's really rewarding in this book is their sort of easter eggs for the readers. What she does is so cool. She you'll find references to station 11 and the glass hotel, but you don't have to have read any of the previous books to appreciate them. But if you had, if you have it's a extra reward. So in the Sea of Tranquility, there is Marilla, who's a side character in the glass hotel, and she talks about Vincent, who was A main character in the glass hotel, and then also kayaks, which is this mythical town is appears in both the glass hotel and the Sea of Tranquility. And what else Oh, this book has been compared to kassu. As she grows, never let me go. So that gives you kind of a, a little bit of a flavor of what it's about. And it also incorporates Emily St. John Mandel has big themes of chance and self reinvention. So she really loves that. But I also wanted to talk about how to classify this book. So she, this book is considered a work of speculative fiction. And what speculative fiction is, had to look it up. It includes science fiction, but it's not limited to science fiction. So it includes it's kind of a broad umbrella that includes fantasy, and dystopian literature. And it's a blanket term for stories that take place beyond our known world. And it also incorporates the simulation hypothesis, which I did not know about that. And what it is, is, it's the idea, and it's a real thing. It's a long held belief that we're actually all living in a computer game. So the book is not about a computer game. But it incorporates this theory, and you have to read to find out how. But this reminds me a little bit of when I met Jeff, Jeff is a philosophy major. And he used to talk to me about what if we're just brains in a vat with our brains being stimulated by electrodes, and we're not actually people at all. And that really drove me crazy. And that's when I first instituted the idea that he's only allowed to talk to me about things that he actually believes to be certain. But he liked to argue about that. And so that's kind of a similar idea. This book is intellectually playful, but I would not be intimidated by it. I am not drawn. If you listen to this podcast regularly, you will know that I'm not a huge fan of science fiction. And I just love this book. And what I think separates Emily St. John Mandel is her ability to talk about ideas, and move the plot along, but also be a wonderful writer. And I feel like that is very unique. There are few writers that can do that, I find that they're usually either one or the other. And her writing is haunting. It's just, it's poetic and haunting. And I just can't say enough about it. So I give this book five stars. And at the end of the year, I'm going to do a little roundup of the books, I give lots of books, four stars. But this book, I give five stars, because I just think it really, it's original, it's easy to well, easy to read, I found it just not hard to read. And beautiful, and also tragic at the same time. So I think you should check that out. Okay, so then the last book we're going to talk about, is when we lost our heads by Heather O'Neill, and this book, How would I describe this book? Well, I'm going to start with a little phrase from the book that's on the inside jacket. And it says, every decent friendships come comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea, it makes it addictive. So you get from the get go, this book is about a dysfunctional friendship, gone very wrong, among other things. And it's also a big book of ideas about women's roles about and about class. So this book is set in Victorian Montreal, and it overtly plays off the French Revolution. But okay, so just a little overview about what this book is about. It's about a character named Maria Antoine, and she's the daughter of the richest man in 19th century, Montreal. And she lives in in just opulent wealth with a full staff along the Golden Mile, which is this historic area that's still there. And some of the mansions are still there. And they were all owned by kind of captains of industry and no railroad people and people who owned businesses that helped kind of start modern Canada. And the author herself is from Heather is from Montreal. And she would walk around in this neighborhood sometimes and think about what really went on in these houses. So that kind of was a little spark of an idea for her. So we've got Maria Antoine, and then we have C Dr. Net who comes to the neighborhood, and her family is a social climbing fat family. And they really want to get into kind of the upper classes, and they're able to afford a place to live there. But they're not quite part of this world. And so she's got all the personality and all the ideas. And they start this very passionate, intense friendship, where they kind of love hate each other. And they're eventually forced to separate. And the book literally starts off with a bang, where the two girls who are like young teens at this point, early teens, young teens, are have guns in their hand, their backs to each other. And they're about to do a duel. And they're in Marie Antoinette gardens, and a maid comes running down to stop them runs in between them, and ends up being shot and killed. And that all happens in the first couple pages. And so from there, the The book takes wildly different directions. And it's very much based on class. So Marie Antoine is fine. The murder gets pinned on Sadie, who doesn't have the money or the power, and Marie Antoine ends up inheriting a sugar, sugar refinery business. And so that's that happens there. And then Sadie goes off. And she ends up living in a brothel. So and their story, she does not start out as someone working in the brothel, but she comes to live there. So you have to read about that. And she lives in a place called the squalid mile, which I'm not sure if that's a real place, I don't actually think it is, but it's a place in this book. So they have these vary. And then the question is, what will happen will they meet up again, and that's kind of where that goes. But this book reminds me very much of a wonderful movie, or really cool movie called Heavenly Creatures. I don't know if you guys have seen it. And it came out in 1994. It was Kate Winslet debut. And it was directed by Peter Jackson. And this book was about a very famous murder that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand. And it was about two young girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet home. And it took place in 1954. And they wanted to be together, they were going to be separated. And they ended up murdering Parker's mother. And they're very much and then this book, it is ambiguous. These all these women kind of seem in love, but then it wasn't really acceptable for them to be in love. So that's not really flushed out there. But anyway, and a little side note, both Pauline and Juliet went on, they went to prison for about five years each, they end up in the UK, and home, ends up taking the name and Perry, and she is a very famous and very prolific detective fiction writer. So I don't know if you knew that connection. But I thought that was really interesting. So Okay, back to when we lost our heads. So when we lost our heads, is very much about it's about the haves and have nots, very much referencing the French Revolution, beginning with the title when we when we lost our heads, I want to tell you a bit a little bit about Heather O'Neill. So she's Canadian from Montreal. Interesting. She was about to graduate from McGill, and she ends up pregnant and has a baby at 20. I would say Heather O'Neill is like, late 30s are no she's in her early 40s. But anyway, that baby, her name is Arizona. And you know, I think a lot of her books feature young girls, and just I don't know, I just think it, but what that probably impacted her, or obviously impacted her greatly. But I wanted to talk about the other book she wrote. So anyway, she came on my radar years ago because she wrote this book called lullaby lullabies for little criminals about just that a young girl who is a petty criminal along with her father living in Montreal, and it actually won. CBC, Canada's CBC, Canada reads, and if you're not familiar with that, or you're not Canadian, what that is it's sort of a literary survivor. were well known Canadians, kind of famous people. Each pick a book that they think can needs to read, and then they tell out at and have this sort of faux argument where they fight over the books. And then each week a book gets knocked off. And then this book ended up winning. So that's where she kind of made her mark. And then she wrote a book called The girl who was Saturday nights, and also the lonely hearts hotel. So she often writes about poverty and people who've been struggling. So this book also looks at poverty. But it also looks at rich people to kind of it's kind of that push and pull. I would call this book magical McCobb grotesque. And it's got kind of reminds me a little bit of Lewis Carroll. There's a lot of weird things happening. I mean, of course, in Victorian times, weird things were happening. There's a scene where there's a Turkey as a pet, that's being paraded around on a black ribbon leash. And it just seems, and there's a lot of kind of, I don't know, it's just reminds me very much of Lewis Carroll. Kind of fantastical. It also reminds me of a book called The Virgin cure by a wonderful Canadian, American Canadian author, Amy Mackay. And that book came out in 2012. And it's about a young girl who's abandoned on the streets of New York City, post Civil War. So this book has themes of class wealth, as I mentioned, kind of feminine rage and feminine women who must play a role. Even Marie Antoine who has everything going for her. She only can really play a specific role like she Yes, she's running a business, but she's still kind of locked down by traditional women's roles in some way. And she's trying to break through with that. The other theme that is huge in this book of sexuality, and that CD ends up writing erotic literature. And there's a lot of mention of that in the book. And I think a lot of that has to do with women's voices and getting the chance to speak out. Or the idea that women men, women's sexuality in even Victorian times, mattered, and was, you know, they were allowed to have sex for pleasure and, and not just for procreation. So, what I thought about this book, I liked this book, I didn't love this book. I liked it. You know, it's interesting. I think the reason why I didn't love it was because many points it made me uncomfortable, like, I felt bad for there's a lot of scenes for about young girls working in the factories. And I found that very difficult to read how their own y'all herself says, you know, the women in the factories. It was some they were almost, you know, they were used, you could overwork them. And they're also cute, and they were tiny, so they could fit between things. Kind of they were nimble, but then they might lose a finger in a machine. So there's just like a lot of that was hard to read. And the CDs time in the brothel was very difficult, I found to read, but I just thought so I don't know. I think the fact that didn't love it might have been that it was difficult. It also reminded me of David Copperfield, I would say that's another thing that says Charles Dickens type feeling to it. It's a larger book. So I liked it. I will say I absolutely love lullabies for little criminals. So if you're interested in that book, I would check that out. That concludes our latest episode of The Red Fern book review. And thank you so much for tuning in. Okay, I will talk to you later.