Booking It: Station Eleven

In Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, the world ends almost quietly. There are no bombs or devastating nuclear holocausts, no alien invasions or apocalyptic meteor crashes, no bizarre and wholly unanticipated environmental disasters, no anthrax or genetically engineered superb ug or villainous plot by a mad genius, and there are no wild dashes across the country, no heroes stealing planes and cars and battling to reach a loved one. There is only an exceptionally deadly strain of flu and the gradual blinking out of those elements that formed the basis of modern civilization. Internet, television, stock market, government, telephones, electricity, newspapers and more: one by one they all disappear.

The novel starts when the famous actor Arthur Leander suffers a heart attack and dies on stage during a performance of King Lear. As a prelude to a novel where almost the entire human population is killed by a virus, this one death is set apart, yet Mandel does not, thankfully, write it as a melodramatic doomsday herald. It is a natural, if not everyday, occurrence, and it is a small tragedy in its own right. Mandel treats individual deaths with first-hand care and attention; they are intimate and brought to life with small details. Consequently, we feel empathy and fear and sadness for those individuals, even though we think only distantly and abstractly about the swaths of humanity that die in the flu.

Arthur Leander’s death is the unifying moment of the novel, as it brings together, in one way or another, the novel’s five central characters. There is Arthur himself, his first wife Miranda, and his best friend Clark, both of whom are present through Arthur. An aspiring EMT named Jeevan jumps up on stage and performs CPR in a vain attempt to revive Arthur, and then briefly comforts the child actress Kirsten, who witnessed the whole thing. The flu strikes that night. What follows after this moment of unification is a novel that moves back in forth in time, from Arthur’s childhood decades before the flu, to Jeevan’s effort to stay safe away from infection by barricading himself and his brother in an apartment, to Kirsten’s life twenty years after the collapse of society. Mandel tells quietly moving stories of lives, of hopes, dreams, goals, achievements, failures and surprises. The stories of five individuals showcase small slivers of a much bigger, more chaotic world that swarms about the characters. This intimate understanding of a relatively miniscule subset of people allows us a glimpse into the world as a whole, and awakes our sympathy in a way that sweeping descriptions could not.

Twenty years after the flu, Kirsten is part of a theatre troupe called the Traveling Symphony which goes from town to town performing music and Shakespeare. Their motto is a quote from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” This is, above all, what Station Eleven is about. These characters struggle to survive in a dangerous, unfamiliar world, but they try to do more than that. They struggle to live life on their own terms and find beauty and hope, no matter the difficulty. This is what makes the novel so compelling, and so hopeful. The novel takes the view that there is more to living than pure subsistence or survival, and that people will cling to art and expression as much as they will cling to food and shelter. Mandel eloquently comments on the power of art, of beauty and of humanity’s desire to survive, even in a world torn to pieces.

The novel is nostalgic in a way unusual to dystopia fiction. Rather than mourn the great abstract concept of modern society, Mandel offers the reader what she calls “an incomplete list” of things now lost. This list includes things such as “diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below” and “porch lights with moths fluttering on a summer night.” This is not a novel of revolution and battle sequences: though the post-apocalyptic world is dangerous, it is not a place filled with total chaos and bloodshed. So instead of the leader of a revolution, we get five relatively ordinary characters. Instead of mourning — a sometimes vague ideal — it is the concrete and comparatively small losses that Mandel points out, losses that are much easier to imagine, and so, in the end, more powerful and visceral to the reader. This quiet novel travels the range of human emotion, from immense sadness and pain to unanticipated joy, offering us a glimpse into a truth about ourselves, about art and about the will to do more than survive.