What should we do with the era of Covid? As a society? As writers?

It’s an understatement for sure to say that it was a difficult time. I look back in anger, and maybe not for the reasons that you might, and that fact makes reckoning with that time period all the complicated–we probably see different villains.

Nevertheless, as writers, our lives bleed into our work. It better to some degree, unless you want writing that’s sterile.

With that said, back to my original question – what do we do with the Covid era? I touched upon it from a distance in my recently published story, One More Darrell, by zeroing in on the isolation of the main character (isolation being one of the Big Bads of that time period for me).

I’ve heard chatter that writers SHOULD be incorporating the Covid era more concretely and directly into stories. Fine, do that. I likely won’t read it. I don’t want to be reminded of it. Forgetting is the best medicine (weird cliche but go with it). Unfortunately (or fortunately) I slipped up and read Emily St. John Mandel’s time-hopping novel Sea of Tranquility, and while it is not about the big C per se, it hits on epidemics. Hard.

Luckily, Mandel, who wrote the mega-successful Station Eleven, is talented enough to push me past my resistance. Also, it helps that it’s not a story ABOUT pandemics. It’s about rips in the fabric of space and time. It’s about people from different eras sharing a common experience. And it asks what is the real nature of the world we live in?

Sea of Tranquility opens with a British nobleman migrating to Canada on the eve of World War 1. He’s a lost soul in the sense that he’s purposeless, and he stumbles on a strange incident in the forests of British Columbia he stumbles upon a strange incident that leaves him forever changed.

From there the novel time jumps ( from the 1910s to the 1990s-2020s, the 2200s, the 2400s, and back and forth). We meet characters including a novelist, Olive Llewelyn, and a time traveler named Gaspery-Jacques Roberts. To explain more of the plot wouldn’t do this book justice (and frankly it’s not so easy to explain without giving it all away). But I will say this. At its heart, Sea of Tranquility is a time travel story. I love time travel stories, but they’re damn near impossible to pull off (the series Dark did it well, so did the movie 12 Monkeys).

But Mandel manages to do it, successfully. She ties together all the back and forth and the here and there that ranges from cities on the moon to the forests of western Canada. It’s a small story; it’s not about the end of the world, or saving the world, or anything like that. It’s just about a group of people who become tied together across space and time through a series of events. Lives are lived and lost and remembered. Sea of Tranquility is a quick read, it has a compelling storyline, and the characters are drawn well.

But I’ve got to knock a star off of my review, and the reason why comes back to my question way at the beginning: what do we do with the Covid era? In Sea of Tranquility, Mandel harkens back to the particularly paranoid aspects of that time, and while it all made sense in the story, it ripped me right out of the book. Nevertheless, I enjoyed my time spent reading it. Time travel plus beautiful prose is the key to my heart.