Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel is a different type of dystopian novel to those I have read previously. We jump around through time beginning on the night where a flu pandemic takes hold in America, moving forward up to twenty years after 99% of the world's human population has been wiped out, and moving back to well before the disaster primarily through the life of a Hollywood actor, Arthur, and his wives.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chillingly realistic pandemic scenes describing the initial panics, blocked highways and overcrowded hospitals (and that aeroplane). The restarting timeline as civilisation begins to collapse was an effective device with elements such as the internet vanishing after so many days, electric lights going out forever, gasoline becoming unusable after Year Five - did you know that gasoline has a shelf life? The idea of survivors just walking and walking resonated particularly well as we see similar scenes right now of refugees escaping war in exactly the same way.

I was less impressed by pre-pandemic scenes, especially Arthur's pampered life and the time dedicated to describing the dystopian comics created by his first wife, Miranda. I understand their inclusion but didn't feel that they warranted so much attention. There is also excessive repetition in Station Eleven which got irritating in the latter half of the book and I felt that tighter editing could have been beneficial.

I have read many post-apocalypse novels, and this is one of the best. Where it differs from the others is that it includes a lot of contemplative ideas about memory and loss, about what we value in our lives. There are parallel narratives from before and after the apocalypse. The "disaster porn" element of it, where you imagine what it would be like to be one of the survivors, is superbly done. But the accounts of the everyday life of the characters beforehand are also compelling . Emily is just a great writer, she has that way with words that creates an internal voice you just can't stop listening to.

Like Margaret Attwood and Kazuo Ishiguro, this author is one of those writers who denies they are SF authors. I am an unashamed genre tribalist - conventions, cosplay, the lot. But it doesn't matter in the end. This is just a great book. Also, I have to admit the non-genre focus really sets this book apart. I think Emily does it better than Kazuo Ishiguro.

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."

No one paid much attention to the Georgia Flu at first, thinking it was localised to Russia. Day One, it arrives in Toronto. One week later, civilisation is collapsing. The death rate is estimated at 99%. Year Twenty, a band of travelling musicians and actors perform to the scattered towns of the survivors. This is the world now, few even remembering when planes flew and electricity brought light to the dark.

I read this excellent post-apocalyptic tale in a day; one of the things that kept me glued to the pages was the mystery of the dog. How did one of the same breed and name come to be there? This web of connections is a defining feature of Station Eleven. We are told the story of a man who died the day Georgia Flu hit North America, but he did not die from the plague. We know he is connected to Kirsten, one of the Travelling Symphony, but why is his backstory so prominent when he is no longer alive?

The motto of the Travelling Symphony is “survival is not sufficient” taken from an episode of Star Trek. I liked that the story focused on a time after the chaos of the plague had subsided and people had found ways to live to some extent. That maybe they could start to think about doing more than just surviving and the arts being part of that. They perform Shakespeare, plays from a time of a different plague, that also prove more popular than more modern offerings. Maybe they provide one small connection to the lost past.

Of course, after society collapses there will always be less than good people who rise up and take advantage. Sometimes the symphony meet these people on their travels. They would normally avoid these towns in future; their philosophy is to not get involved in the politics of others. But sometimes that’s easier said than done.

The title comes from a series of comics, produced on a small scale, which struck a chord with Kirsten who was given them as a child. They serve as a connection to the before but the content shares characteristics with the after. As a side note, the UK cover is in the same hues as the comics (and is so much more inviting than the US offering).

The narrative jumps around between Year Twenty, which is the present and various points in the past. Much of it in the before but as the story progresses and the connections start to snowball, some of the immediate after is revealed. It’s not a story of heroes but of normal people, working out how to live their lives when nearly everything they know is gone.

Review copy provided by publisher.