Sea of Tranquility v. Babel
The 2023 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 30 • ZOMBIE ROUND
Sea of Tranquility
v. Babel
Judged by Xuan Juliana Wang
Xuan Juliana Wang (she/her) was born in Heilongjiang, China, but after age seven has done most of her growing up in Los Angeles and New York. She is the author of the short-story collection Home Remedies. Known connections to this year’s contenders: None. / @xuanjuliana
When Babel first arrived at my desk, I gasped. If this were a battle of book physiques, Babel and Sea of Tranquility are not in the same weight class. Babel is enormous and somehow muscular-looking. The cover’s gold capital letters and sentence-long title made me anxious, like I should have a hot meal before picking it up. Sea of Tranquility, on the other hand, blinked back at me like a kind vegetarian friend with whom I couldn’t wait to spend an afternoon together.
I usually avoid long novels for a myriad of reasons, but mostly I am afraid that while I am reading such a book in bed, it will fall on my face and give me a black eye. Or my pinky finger will go numb trying to hold the pages open. That said, I overcame my dumb fears and can tell you what I thought about the inside of these two books, which is what counts.
Within the opening chapters of Sea of Tranquility, the son of an earl speaks out against colonialism in front of English society and receives his father’s punishment of exile to Canada. In Babel, an orphaned Chinese boy is miraculously saved from cholera by an Englishman and taken to Oxford to study with a group of other international students with the express goal of serving the British Empire. Both books have multi-perspectival views of the extraordinary circumstances. Both plots whisk the reader outside the confines of realism. Both books open with characters questioning the validity of economic systems that privileges one group of people by exploiting another. From there however, the books spin wildly away from one another.
I wished so often for Robin to lean on a pillow and reflect more deeply on what was happening to him.
Sea of Tranquility is captivating and expertly assembled. I read it in one sitting. The nested stories rotate in numbered sections at a steady, pleasing, if not always surprising pace. When the book draws my attention to a line—“The things we see when we’re young, sometimes they don’t stay with us”—I am prepared for the meaning to reverberate throughout the rest of the book. The characters in Sea of Tranquility, even if we just meet them for a moment, feel alive and recognizable in their self-reflections on love and guilt. “She never dwelt on my lapses and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.”
The characters in Babel are not so precisely and evenly drawn. But it’s not because they are too busy downing tea and lemon biscuits to reflect on the matters of their hearts. It’s just that what they are doing is so inherently fascinating that it’s almost as if the book runs out of breath. Right in the opening pages, a young boy who names himself Robin trades one country for another and encounters all of Western education. He is groomed by a cruel father to enter the world of Oxford where he learns the mystical act of silver-making and the dark art of translating one language to another.
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I wished so often for Robin to lean on a pillow and reflect more deeply on what was happening to him. For example, it only took a few paragraphs for Robin to speak for the first time to the half-brother he never knew existed, who he thought was his doppelgänger, and for that brother to cast suspicion on Robin’s mother’s death, and then it just moves on! They start drinking and walking around and talking about, well, staging a revolution.
The news said it would snow in Los Angeles, but I didn’t trust the news until snow literally fell on my face.
“Liberation was a string of coincidences, of ingenuity, resourcefulness and luck,” said another character about revolutions, and I couldn’t help but imagine that that same balance needed to be in play to pull off this deeply ambitious book. As someone who is not familiar with the tropes of historical fantasy, I was amused by the shorthand, matter-of-fact explanations. Silver, which is without any real clarification, is a magical element that can be used as a weapon, a cure of all diseases, as well as a type of energy-generating technology. I loved the idea that the most valuable students are ones who are “truly fluent” in another language, and by that they mean someone who can dream in another language. Turns out these dreamers are the ones making the best at making silver. “But Britain is the only place where I’ve seen silver bars in wide use,” Robin reflects, “…it seems a bit strange that British are the only ones who get to use them when Chinese and Indians are contributing to the crucial components of their functioning.” This idea is repeated throughout the book, and each time I found myself drawing new connections to the cruelties and injustices tolerated in our present world.
When I started reading Sea of Tranquility, the news said it would snow in Los Angeles, but I didn’t trust the news until snow literally fell on my face. However, if Sea of Tranquility hinted that snow would fall, I would expect it to happen in the next 20 pages because the writing is that persuasive. I trusted the writer would find a way to connect storylines through time and space, and that it would make sense even before I read it. And in that way, it lost the external chaos and internal mayhem I wanted in a century-spanning story about time and pandemics and moon colonies.
It was Babel’s inconsistencies and imperfections that made it alluring to me as a reader. It felt like I was bunking with a group of young people actively trying to figure out not just one thing, but every single thing about life based on what they know about their roots, their mother tongue, and what they should want and are willing to give up. And sure, some of their reasons don’t quite make sense, but the questions they generated kept me up all night, pinky so numb, turning the pages.
Advancing:
Babel
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin Guilfoile: A novel is a collaboration between author and reader. Every reader brings something different to that collaboration. As a result, every reader of Sea of Tranquility or Babel, or whatever novel, reads a different book.
Last week I mentioned a reader who had a sophisticated interpretation of one of my novels and was very disappointed to learn that her reading of the book had never occurred to me. But she shouldn’t have been disappointed. What she brought to the novel made it better for her. Being a good reader means you can make the novels you read better.
I suppose the inverse is also true. A reader can make a book worse.
John Warner: For sure, approaching a novel with a decidedly ungenerous spirit can distort the text itself to some degree. This is a problem I think I’ve mostly outgrown, but there have for sure been times where I’ve entered the experience closed off in a way that would’ve prevented establishing any kind of relationship with a book.
Kevin: I know novelists who think of their relationship to readers as being more like professor and student. The writer’s interpretation of the text is the only one that matters. They are deluding themselves. Because the reader entirely controls the circumstances under which they read. Are they in a good mood or a bad mood? Are they reading for work or pleasure? Are they on vacation? Going through a divorce? Are they reading fast or slow? All of these things and a million other variables can affect our appreciation of what we read. It affects the words on the page.
John: I understand that impulse, the desire to be heard, to be understood in the exact way you’re attempting to relate to the world. But the world is under no obligation to bend to your will, and those underlying circumstances can be dispositive to the reader’s experience. Who among us hasn’t failed to engage with a book at one point in time, only to be captured by it later, or even the reverse, to have a book knock us off our feet, only to later experience it as a gentle breeze? That’s why these things will always be fascinating, and we’ll never run out of things to keep talking about.
Kevin: I like that Judge Wang gives us some glimpses into the circumstances under which she read these books. She read one in a single sitting as snow fell on Los Angeles. Those two factors are not irrelevant to her reading of the text. And she likes art with inconsistencies and imperfections. As it happens, I do too.
John: These are two books I quite enjoyed, but for totally different reasons, reasons similar to what Judge Wang discusses here, though my call would’ve gone the other direction. I was captured by Babel’s story and engaged by the world that Kuang builds in the novel. But Sea of Tranquility got inside me in ways beyond my conscious understanding. There are a lot of different pleasures in reading, but for me, that’s the deepest one. There are a few books in this year’s field that managed that feat, and those will always be the ones I most value.
Kevin: The first match of the Tournament gave us a major upset with a book by a legendary American author falling to a writer’s third novel. And now today, on the eve of the championship, another one seed falls to a four in a Rocky II-like rematch. That sets up a three seed versus a four in the championship as Babel takes on The Book of Goose with a live rooster among the spoils.
Rosecrans Baldwin: And let me jump in, while we’re talking spoils, and announce our annual Contest of the Commentariat. In the comments below, name your favorite to win tomorrow’s championship, along with your prediction for the final score. There are 17 judges so your prediction should add up to 17. E.g., Babel 9-8 or The Book of Goose 10-7, etc. We’ll randomly select two lucky winners from the correct entries to receive a year-long subscription to Field Notes and a gift card to Books Are Magic.
In the meantime, we’ll see you in the comments, then back here tomorrow for the championship!
Today’s mascot
Today’s mascot is the lovely Tarzan, via Kay H.! Kay says, “I’d like to nominate my very old cat, Tarzan, who helped raise two actual human children and has lived in South Carolina, Illinois, and also in Germany, charming the neighbors in all three locations. He actively encourages reading and is willing to hold me down to keep me reading, unless it’s dinnertime.” Welcome, Tarzan!
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