STATION ELEVEN...A Book Review
STATION ELEVEN:
A NOVEL
By Emily St. John Mandel
2014; Alfred A. Knopf;
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4
333 Pages; USD $24.95
A Book Review by
Marianne Plumridge - November 2014
On a snowy winter night in Toronto, a well-loved and
celebrated actor dies onstage during his quintessential performance of
Shakespeare’s King Lear. A child
actress who was close to the actor, witnesses his death while a member of the
audience leaps onto the stage to try and save him. As a little-noticed backdrop
to this drama, a much greater tragedy begins to unfurl its tendrils all around
the world. This single death becomes a catalyst for a number of people, radiating
outward in a tangled cause and effect of connectivity. Still touching them decades
on into the future, past the ravening clutches of the Georgia Flu which came
out of the nether reaches of Russia to kill each of its victims within a few
short hours of contact, and into the remnant pockets of civilization that are
left.
Jeevan Chaudhary was the man, an EMT, who leapt onto the
stage to save a life in vain. During that time, Arthur Leander, actor, died,
and Jeevan’s girlfriend callously abandoned him and went home. Jeevan subsequently
wanders the snowy, freezing night trying to collect himself in the
aftermath…and receives the first of a series of devastating phone calls from a
friend who is an emergency room doctor. The friend, who is known to be
unflappable in the face dire odds, is panicking over this new bug called the
Georgia Flu. The infected are insurmountable and the deaths are piling up. In the
last phone call, Jeevan hears his friend coughing and an eerie sense of defeat.
An impulsive shopping spree at a late night market lands Jeevan, along with
seven trolley loads of food, water and essentials at his invalid brother’s
apartment ready to settle in for the duration. He was one of the lucky ones.
Kirsten, the little girl actress from the play, never sees her parents again
and she is handed over to the care her older brother while the city begins to
panic. Amidst a nightmare of the dying, they eventually walk out of a dead
city.
A plane carrying several family and friends to Arthur Leander’s funeral in Toronto
is diverted to the Severn Airport and never leaves it again.
The dividing line between ‘before’ and ‘after’ in this story
is drawn by a vignette called ‘An Incomplete List’. It is a litany of perceptions rather than a complete
and literal notation of every little thing the human race currently takes for
granted…all that is lost to them in their post apocalyptic future. It is enough
to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.
Present time begins again twenty years in the future with
the travels of the nomadic Traveling Symphony. The rustic group brings performances
of music – “classical, jazz, and orchestral renditions of pre-collapse pop
songs”, and Shakespeare’s plays to the isolated towns and encampments in a
circuitous annual pilgrimage like the troubadours of centuries past. It is here
that the beauty of the author’s world-building really begins. Little Kirsten is
now a lead actress in the plays the Symphony performs, and it is through her
eyes the reader witnesses the state of survival and the remnant population at
large, including loves, losses, discoveries, danger and death along the way.
The Symphony returns to an ad hoc town called St Deborah by the Water after a
two year absence to pick up two of their company that they were forced to leave
behind. The town is mysteriously not the same and the two lost players and
their newborn child have disappeared. A religious Prophet of enormous charisma
and dangerous deception has taken over the town and sees it as his property,
along with any woman or girl that catches his eye. The Symphony flees the town,
but not without dire repercussions. Apparently, the Prophet digs graves for
those who desert him, escaping the town and his absolute authority. Any who
dare to return, do not survive their readymade graves for long.
The narrative is told in rather an abstract way, with
flashbacks and the perspectives of other survivors stories interspersed with
the dangers facing Kirsten, her friends, and the Symphony as a whole. Every one
of them, each tidbit of story is tantalizing and compelling, being woven into a
unique tapestry that culminates in several ‘a-ha’ moments for the reader. Some
of them I saw coming, some I didn’t. The text is beautifully written and
totally evocative, and is a ‘page turner’ of the first order in spite of the
abstract nature of its construction. The
‘Station Eleven’ of the novel’s title is the title of a series of strictly
limited comic books created by Arthur Leander’s first wife, Miranda. Kirsten
has two issues of the gorgeously rendered painted books and has carried them
with her since that long ago fateful night and Arthur’s death. Doctor Eleven is
the physicist hero of the books and takes his name from the station where he
resides. He lives on a highly advanced space station that looks like a small
planetoid. It has deep blue seas and rocky islands linked by bridges, and
orange and crimson skies with two moons balancing on the horizon. However,
Station Eleven is damaged. A hostile alien force has taken over the Earth and
enslaved the population. Doctor Eleven, along with his colleagues and a number
of refugees stole the space station and steered it through a black hole a
thousand years in the future. In the battle to do so, the satellite’s
artificial sky and a number of vital systems controlling the ocean levels were
damaged. The moon-sized space station’s surface is so flooded that there are
only a few remnant islands and an almost perpetual twilight. By fifteen years
of hiding, a portion of the disaffected who have to live hand to mouth beneath
the oceans want to go home…returning to Earth: to a hostile occupation force,
yes, but also to a real sun and sunlight, real air, ocean and dirt, to a dream
of restoration of all that they left behind. Somehow it echoes the longing of
some of the real world survivors for what was lost.
Strangely enough, it is these two comic books that form a linkage from what was
to what is, as much as Arthur Leander’s death does in the story. STATION ELEVEN
has to be about the most beautifully written post-apocalyptic story I’ve ever
read. The narration flows marvelously and you hang on tenterhooks to find out
what happened to various characters along the way. A kind of wistfulness about our 21st
century culture prevails as a subtext, essaying an uneasy, but gentle undertone
that it will not, cannot last.
As a well written, slightly ‘out of the box’ novel of
enormous charm, STATION ELEVEN is a refreshingly different take on an ‘end of
the world’ scenario. Less about the mass of depraved horrors that the human
race can descend to, once the thin veneer of civilization has been stripped
away, and more about surviving, and emerging on the other side and finding
community again, one way or another. Less about the violence and gun battles
that seem to imbue so many other ‘apocalypses’ where humanity has to physically
fight to survive, and more about the survivors fight to regain their humanity
and find others like them in a nearly totally depopulated world. Think a much
nicer version of Stephen King’s THE STAND, with the ‘evil’ lacking supernatural
overtones. Two decades out from Georgia Flu, survival means letting the past
slide into yet another mythos, and rebuilding again to suit the current
circumstances and needs. Fate, chance choice, circumstance, luck, coincidence,
fear, courage, despair, drive, need, love, community, and necessity are the
building blocks of this story…and it is a VERY worthwhile read. And by the end
of the book, you’ll believe, along with Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony
players that humanity can be saved….”Because survival is insufficient”.
This was an entirely enjoyable read and something I will keep on my bookshelf to read again soon.
Cheers,
Marianne
