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Space travel is always an exciting yet perilous proposition.

Similarly, this journey through space and time by Emily St. John Mandel is an exciting yet precarious way to create a novel. A simple mistake might have made this whole attempt a futile one.

In this book, you will have to get yourself ready for a roller coaster ride transcending centuries, planets, and pandemics.

"I think you'd want to visit all those points in time," Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 1912, the video artist in 2019 or 2020, and the novelist in 2203.��

The above sentence shows us different things happening in different centuries in this book. The journey of Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a detective in the Night City, to investigate an anomaly in the North American wilderness will take you through an extraordinary experience that might be way beyond your imagination.

What I learned from this book
1) The impact of pandemics in our life
The pandemic plays an important role in this novel. The author goes into the deeper impacts of the pandemic in our daily lives in this book.

"Pandemics don't approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It's disorienting. The pandemic is far away, and then it's all around you with seemingly no intermediate step."

2) Bureaucracy
Ethical dilemmas of bureaucracy are a widely discussed topic. Dilemmas as to whether bureaucracy should become autonomous or directly accountable and to the extent of adherence to the law are all still debatable. Emily St. John Mandel takes a different approach to defining bureaucracy in this book.

"What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself."

3) Are human beings as a species narcissistic?
This is a tricky question to ask. The author vehemently criticizes the inherent tendency of human beings to believe and behave in a way that they are at the climax of the story. Proper contemplation after finishing this book will give you a better perspective on this concept.

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we're living at the climax of the story. It's a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we're uniquely important, that we're living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it's ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world"

My favourite three lines from this book

“Sometimes you don't know you're going to throw a grenade until you've already pulled the pin.��

“This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.��

"You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She'd seen five of those tattoos, but that didn't make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone's skin."

What could have been better?
The author's writing style is a little different from many contemporary authors, and there is a probability that some readers will not grasp the soul of this novel due to her different writing style.

Rating
5/5 This book is a brilliant creation that only very few can understand with its whole essence. If you are one among that lucky few, you are going to cherish the experience of reading this book.