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.