Station Eleven

An aging actor drops dead of a heart attack on stage, an omen for a sweeping flu pandemic that will decimate the world's population within weeks.

Station Eleven does something that I hadn't thought was possible: it offers something new and exciting in the post-apocalyptic genre. I have read a lot of post-apocalyptic books, and I was getting burned out on them. It seemed like there was nothing new to say about the fall of humanity. But this novel comes forward and defies my expectations. It is a quiet, moving story, elegiac for what is lost, such as technology and modern conveniences, but still hopeful for humanity. It skips a lot of brutality that is the hallmark of post-apocalyptic fiction by jumping around in time from before the show more pandemic to twenty years after, eliding those first few difficult years and leaving them up to the reader's imagination. It also omits the tedious details of survival after our global industrial web has failed us, although some details, such as the survivors setting up small communities in truck stops and airports rather than in the houses of the dead, struck me as absolutely believable. As the world has fallen back into a dark age, some of the survivors have created a traveling symphony and acting troupe, which only performs Shakespeare. They travel from settlement to settlement to bring art and music to the post-apocalyptic world, because "survival is insufficient."

This novel is not about survival; it's about people, particularly those invisible connections that link our lives like webs. By moving back and forth in time, following the strands of the web wherever they might go, Station Eleven gradually builds our knowing of and empathy for these people, both those who survived and those who didn't, even the rare ones who go bad. All of the characters are linked to movie star Arthur Leander, whose death while playing King Lear opens the book, but there are even more connections, gradually revealed, that show how we all are fundamentally linked to one another. While so many post-apocalyptic books are about losing our humanity, Station Eleven is about reinforcing what makes us human, the fundamental connections that we share.

My favorite of all the characters was Miranda Carroll, Leander's first wife, who was someone I felt I could know or even could have been, in an alternate life. Miranda is an artist who spends much of her time working on an ambitious project called Station Eleven, a comic book within a book that proves to be immune to the flu pandemic. This motif also reinforces the human connections between us, and how those connections are strengthened by the art we make. Even though this book is about much of humanity dying out, it didn't depress me; it lifted me and inspired me. show less

Warning. This is a pandemic book.

Mandel follows a set of interconnected characters from just before a cataclysmic virus kills 99% of the people in the world, through the next 20 years, showing how the survivors manage and in some cases thrive. While the disaster is preeminent, the story is gripping in many different ways. A third of the way in, I was so immersed in the story that I had to remind myself forcefully that we are not in this deep a predicament. now.

The characters, pre and post-pandemic, live for connections, some to the past, most to the present, the tasks of survival and friendship. There is a bogeyman, of course. But there is also hope.

Station Eleven begins just before a pandemic sweeps the globe and kills 99.99% of the population. Much of the novel takes place in Year Twenty - the 20th year since the pandemic - and follows the Traveling Symphony, a group of Shakespearean actors and musicians that travels between small settlements. Kirsten, who was eight when the pandemic hit and doesn't remember any of Year One, is a member of the Symphony, and also the owner of a rare copy of a graphic novel called Station Eleven. She has never met anyone else who has heard of the comic, but then she meets a man who calls himself a prophet, who has a dog named Luli - just like in Station Eleven.

Station Eleven almost has the feel of a time travel novel, because of the way characters show more are connected through objects and time; the author continually loops back to fill in more of the plot as the main characters begin to converge in Year Twenty. The past becomes myth as children born after the pandemic grasp toward an understanding of electricity, air travel, and the Internet, and new societies are formed - some violent, some religious, some cooperative. Emily St. John Mandel combines heart and imagination to create a post-apocalyptic scenario that is utterly believable and wonderfully realized.

Kirkus review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/emily-st-john-mandel/station-eleven/

Quotes

Epigraph: "...And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour, / And for me, now as then, it is too much. / There is too much world." -Czeslaw Milosz

Arthur lives in a permanent state of disorientation like a low-grade fever, the question hanging over everything being How did I get from there to here? (Arthur Leander, 60)

It is sometimes necessary to break everything. (Miranda, 66)

Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult. (Miranda, 70)

The sensation of being in a dream that will end at any moment, only she isn't sure if she's fighting to wake up or to stay asleep. (Miranda, 80)

She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle. (Kirsten, 90)

What did it mean to seem like yourself, in the course of such unspeakable days? How was anyone supposed to seem? (Kirsten, 103)

The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it? Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad. So many species had appeared and later vanished from this earth; what was one more? How many people were even left now? (Kirsten, 109)

"Unsparing," Clark said. "That could mean anything." But probably nothing good, he decided. No one's ever described as being unsparingly kind. (Clark, re: Dear V: An Unauthorized Portrait of Arthur Leander, 116)

Hell is the absence of the people you long for. (Kirsten, 106)

"...They're like sleepwalkers," she said, "and nothing ever jolts them awake." (Clark, 120)

Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. (Jeevan, 128)

First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered. (excerpt from the ghostwritten biography that Jeevan's brother Frank is writing, 133)

The more you remember, the more you've lost. (Kirsten, 139)

None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended. (140)

Those previous versions of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she'd known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them. (Miranda, 144)

"You know where I'm from," he said, and she understood what he meant by this....none of this would seem real if it wasn't for you. (Arthur and Miranda, 146)

She was thinking about the way she'd always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees. (Miranda, 159)

Time had been reset by catastrophe. After a while they went back to the old way of counting days and months, but kept the new system of years:...Year Four was when Clark realized this was the way the years would continue to be marked from now on, counted off one by one from the moment of disaster. (Clark, 162)

These taken-for-granted miracles that had persisted all around them. (Clark, 163)

...furious because fury was the last defense against understanding what the news stations were reporting. Beneath the fury was something literally unspeakable...It was possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak, but it wasn't possible to comprehend what it meant. (Clark, 166)

Even after all these years there were moments when he was overcome by his good fortune at having found this place, this tranquility, this woman, at having lived to see a time worth living in. (Jeevan, 190)

He liked to close his eyes and let his memories overtake him. A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films... (Arthur, 196)

But look, she'd told him, the difference was that they'd seen electricity, they'd seen everything, they'd watched a civilization collapse, and Shakespeare hadn't. In Shakespeare's time the wonders of technology were still ahead, not behind them, and far less had been lost. (Kirsten, 201)

...she knew: it is possible to survive this but not unaltered... (Kirsten, 207)

The thought of walking here in the snowstorm, desperate to get away from the sickness in town, and at the end of that walk there's this sign, and when you read it you understand that [it] isn't going to be possible to get away from this. (Kirsten, 208)

The shock of realizing that this was probably actually the ending, after a lifetime of near misses, after all this time. She walked forward through the radiant world... (Kirsten, 210)

We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid. (Kirsten, 211)

The shock of being alive. (Kirsten, 212)

...but he was just a dead man on another road, answerless, the bearer of another unfathomable story about walking out of one world and into another. (Kirsten, 213)

"Are you asking if I believe in ghosts?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Yes."
"Of course not. Imagine how many there'd be." (Kirsten and Charlie, 216)

...but music had always unmoored her, and her thoughts drifted. (Kirsten, 216)

Always these memories, barely submerged. (Jeevan, 219)

Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream. (Station Eleven, 231)

If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? (Clark, 232) show less

A little bit of literary fiction woven in with different narratives of people connected to one another through time. Oh, and a flu epidemic that wipes out most of humanity. And a troupe of Shakespearean actors and a symphony traveling through the wasteland bringing a bit of culture to survivors. Oh--yes. Any story where the band and drama kids survived the apocalypse is cool with me. And a cult. Did I mention the cult? Because what would a post-apocalypse be like without someone building a religion to explain why it happened and why they the chosen survived. I only wished this novel would have been longer.

You meet people pre-apocalypse and post and I liked how their stories threaded one another. Some survive, many don't but in this show more story their lives mattered. And culture matters. How do we build a rebuild a world that maintains the best of our old--like the bard?

I enjoyed this immensely. show less

I read this for my real world book club January meeting. I’m really glad that a fellow member suggested it. It had been on my to read shelf but so are thousands of other books that can languish there forever.

This is my kind of book: speculative fiction but with our real world and real people and a plausible story. Pandemic disease is also of interest to me, as are post-apocalyptic books, especially ones that spend a lot of time focusing on day-to-day life, as this one does.

Overall, I think this is a brilliantly told story. It’s very clever. I loved the various storylines and timelines and how they connected with one another, and they did so nearly perfectly. It’s one of those books I’d like to reread and know from the start show more everyone’s story and what happens to them. I was very grateful for all the flashbacks. My favorite portions tended to be the events that happened right after and right before the collapse, and then I also loved the ending.

I was fascinated by almost all the characters and appreciated that there were always many I could root for, and even the ones I couldn’t, I could feel some empathy for them.

I guessed fairly early on who the prophet was but really had no idea what would happen until it was revealed.

I understand why Shakespeare’s are the plays appealing to (some of) the survivors, and the music too, as they were overall pre-technology so therefore also post technology. I also got a kick out of how a sort of religion/cult could arise from basically nothing, but it made sense. I’m glad that those parts were a relatively small part of the story. At first I thought the wonderful premise for the story didn’t need the extra dramatic plot points, but then it became clear that every character and sub-story were there for a reason.

I think that this is a really thought provoking book and will be good for our book club discussion. It made me think about what matters most, what I could and could tolerate, how I’d fare should these events come to pass and I was one of the survivors. There are many sad parts, some tragic, but I found the book to be so absorbing and not really depressing. There is definitely hope in this story.

One of my pet peeves: What’s with books that have many pages missing page numbers, especially with no pattern as to which pages have numbers and which don’t?! show less

The hype is deserved. This book is wonderful. I think about post-apocalyptic stories all the time, they're overlayed on every fear I have about what's happening in our world, and Mandel's version is so rich and compelling that it's supplanted a lot of my previous templates for what an American apocalypse is likely to look like. It's a post-apocalypse about community rather than individual survival -- a fictional version of the recent histories in Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell -- which is so so rare.

Human threats largely take the familiar shape of misogynist domination; one problem with this book is that it elides the other familiar shape of racist domination. Neither is likely to disappear along with 99% of humanity. But show more the characters largely do the decent thing: exile a rapist from a newly forming small community, allow an abused teenager to join a band of travelers. No one is unrealistically selfless, but they don't become Mad Max-style monsters either. Humans have always cared for each other in communities, and there's no reason to expect that to be any different after a worldwide apocalypse. show less

This took me nearly a decade to get to, but what a time to read it. The pandemic is cooling off but still very recent in our minds. So many people were lost, but we still have civilization in tact. A look at a world where a pandemic wiped out so many people that it's now post-apocalyptic certainly makes you think. This feels like it could be a thriller at certain points, but it's much slower paced and concerned with examining the lives of people before and after the plague. I really enjoyed this as much as it was bleak.