Station Eleven

I'll be honest, I was nervous to finally pick up an Emily St. John Mandel book. I have heard wonderful things about how she constructs her stories in a deeply introspective, yet accessible way. I was afraid Station Eleven wouldn't live up to the hype. So I was ultimately so happy to have enjoyed this book.

Station Eleven follows a few different, interconnected points of view across timelines. The central narrative straddles what is basically the end of civilization as a deadly plague ravages the world and decimates the population in a matter of weeks. We follow some characters lives before this collapse, some after, and some between the two, but all linked in unique ways.

While I did find some of the jumping to be distracting, I did enjoy every point of view and the care the author took in developing each of them. They were all beautifully written and complex, however the main POVs were written to be a bit flawless. FYI if you prefer your characters to be a bit more rough around the edges.

Regarding the pacing, the pre-collapse chapters were deeply introspective while the post-collapse chapters had a healthy balance of action and internal monologuing. Each chapter seamlessly wove into the next one to create a very interesting web of narratives that each inform a part of the story. I found it to be very compelling and well executed.

The story itself was quite interesting. There were parts of it I found difficult to read, not because of the pandemic or the fall of civilization, but because of the depressing thought of evangelical extremism persisting after the apocalypse. I've had too much evangelical extremism in my life lately..

I was considering jumping into Sea of Tranquility right after this, but I'm now energized to pick up The Glass Hotel first to really savor St. John Mandel's writing. I can't wait to dive into her other works.

Emily St. John Mandel wrote in an article somewhere that perhaps Station Eleven is not her idea of recommended reading during a pandemic, but here I am anyway. Somehow we as social creatures are drawn to morbid and tragic media not only during the course of our mundane ordinary lives, but especially during times of distress and upheaval. It is comforting to me on one hand to read of such familiar situations and thought processes, and yet, on the other hand, to have gratitude that in many ways my world is better off than this fictional one.

Still, the characters' emotional struggles and turmoils are a sort of way for the reader to sublimate their own anxieties and stresses. Which is perhaps to say, hey, if these characters can find moments of joy and happiness in this absolute hellscape, perhaps I can too... and I've still got electricity and internet, and while that lasts, more books on my Kindle that I'll ever get around to reading. Zoom meetings, hangouts, and seminars to be attended. Humans sure are a resilient bunch.

I'd added this to my wishlist but by the time it was available at the library, I'd forgotten whatever I'd read about it that caused me to add it. So from the title alone, I assumed it might be some kind of science fiction book set on a space station. Wrong! Although the Station Eleven in question is indeed a space station, it's one that only exists in a comic book written by a character within the book, which is set very much here and now, present day, when it starts.

This book was written in 2014, but remarkably prescient given that just 6 years later we're in the middle of a global pandemic. The book's plot revolves around a global pandemic known as the "Georgia flu". It spreads rapidly around the world through airline travel. Unlike our current pandemic, symptoms develop within 3-4 hours and most infected people die within a day, so the impact is immediate and extremely deadly, and within weeks has wiped out probably 99% of the world's population, causing a complete collapse of civilization - phones stop working, electricity goes off, gas runs out. Survivors flee the cities and form small town settlements for farming and mutual protection.

The narrative moves back and forth between the present, starting about a day before the outbreak starts, when a famous actor has a heart attack during a production of King Lear, and about 25 years in the future, where it follows a caravan of actors/musicians who travel from town to town performing symphonies and Shakespeare plays. The main characters in the book all have some kind of tie to the famous actor, and the pandemic is illustrated by their various perspectives both pre- and post-pandemic (those who survived it anyway).

Very cleverly written, extremely readable, and VERY topical right now, a clear illustration of what might have been much worse if Covid-19 had been a bit more infectious and a bit more deadly, and what could easily still happen another time. Mostly it's a chilling reminder of just how fragile our current lifestyles are, and how easily everything we take for granted could still fall apart completely when the wrong virus comes along. I ended up reading the entire thing in one sitting, it was hard to put down.

Unique and creatively told. It's well-written, gentle, nostalgic, and human-focused. The post-apocalyptic setting and its finer details take a backseat to the intertwined characters. Stated in the summary, the book revolves around a performance of Shakespeare's King Lear, and has continuous time jumps back and forth—so maybe it’s a little highbrow for me and I missed bits of brilliant underlying storytelling. My uncultured, Neanderthal self would have much preferred the conflicts about to unfold to not be interrupted with constant flashbacks.

Characters: Some are only pre-apocalypse, some only post. Yet we follow them for long amounts of time. Those in both pre and post-apocalypse go through dramatic changes, but we don’t usually get to hear much about how or why. A post-apocalyptic traveling symphony is a great concept. But I wasn’t attached to any of the characters—I couldn't picture them in my head, and wasn’t rooting for anyone to accomplish anything specific. So if the focus is on everyone’s interconnected relationships, you see the bind I’m in. Regardless, this was an enjoyable and unique read.

1) "The king stood in a pool of blue light, unmoored. This was act 4 of King Lear, a winter night at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto. Earlier in the evening, three little girls had played a clapping game onstage as the audience entered, childhood versions of Lear's daughters, and now they'd returned as hallucinations in the mad scene. The king stumbled and reached for them as they flitted here and there in the shadows. His name was Arthur Leander. He was fifty-one years old and there were flowers in his hair."

2) "An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.
[...]
No more countries, all borders unmanned."

3) "There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was travelling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels. The Travelling Symphony moved between the settlements of the changed world and had been doing so since five years after the collapse, when the conductor had gathered a few of her friends from their military orchestra, left the air base where they'd been living, and set out into the unknown landscape."

4) "'It's the work itself that's important to me.' Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it's true? 'Not whether I publish it or not.'
'I think that's so great,' Elizabeth says. 'It's like, the point is that it exists in the world, right?'
'What's the point of doing all that work,' Tesch asks, 'if no one sees it?'
'It makes me happy. It's peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn't really matter to me if anyone sees it.'"

5) "On his last morning on earth, Arthur was tired. He'd laid awake until sunrise and then drifted out of a twilight half-sleep in the late morning, sluggish and dehydrated, a throbbing headache behind his eyes. Orange juice would've helped, but when he looked in the fridge there was only a mouthful left in the bottom of the carton. Why hadn't he bought more? He had had insomnia for the past three nights, and his exhaustion was such that this was enough to send him spiralling into something not far from fury, the fury contained with difficulty by breathing deeply and counting to five, soothed by the cold air on his face. He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast—scrambled eggs—and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theatre an hour early so he'd have time to linger with a newspaper over his second-to-last coffee at his favourite coffee place, all of the small details that comprise a morning, a life."

If you loved The Passage, you’ll like Station Eleven. The parallels between Cronin’s book and St. John Mandel’s are so strong that a character in the latter even mentions the former (though not by name). The comparison flatters Station Eleven.

The story follows various characters before, during, and after a superflu epidemic that kills almost everybody. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, following people living their mundane lives in the years before the outbreak and trying to live any life at all in the wasteland afterward.

St. John Mandel’s prose is fluid and sometimes poetic, and her characters unfold at a comfortable pace. The book is about half contemporary character study and half post-apocalyptic survival story, and the contrast between the two worlds kept me interested when the plot didn’t.

That plot is arbitrary and mostly nonsense. Characters who don’t know each other end up having unlikely (but narratively convenient) connections to each other, and the cartoonish villains perform impossible feats in order to antagonize the heroes.

I’m pretty good at suspending my disbelief, but the setting raised too many questions for me. How could a flu virus with 24-hour lethality spread across the entire world in days? The survivors of the plague must hide from starving marauders within days of the outbreak, so what happened to all the canned food and solar panels? Why do people, 20 years later, avoid the cities? It doesn’t follow.

This all bothered me, but the book has real pleasures too: St. John Mandel’s writing flows, she strikes memorable notes of horror and grace, and her characters have life. In particular the Traveling Symphony, a troupe of actors and musicians that travel the fallen world playing concerts and performing Shakespeare “because survival is insufficient”, is a charming idea.

Its flaws sometimes obscure its merits, but if you’re a fan of both the kind of insightful character development called “literature” and post-apocalyptic survival stories, this is a pretty good instance of both.