Station Eleven

Books about the end of civilization as we know it are in vogue right now. Mostly they've been in the horror or YA categories, with zombies running wild or teenage girls fighting the powers that be. Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel, has neither of those things (it does have a young woman who's pretty handy with knives) and has cracked the "literature" arena, being nominated for a National Book Award.

Station Eleven begins with a production of King Lear in Toronto. The lead actor, a movie star named Arthur Leander, dies on stage of a heart attack. A young man, Jeevan, who is training to be an EMT, tries to save him. We will learn later that Jeevan was once a paparazzi, then an entertainment journalist that interviewed Leander. In the wings is a small child, Kirsten.

Later than night a flu epidemic, that originated in the European nation of Georgia, will sweep across the West, In a matter of weeks millions will die, and there will be no electricity, no air travel, no Internet. "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,"

As with all of these kind of books, the great question for the reader is, "What would you do?" In Station Eleven, the quote from a Star Trek episode, "Survival is insufficient" is the dogma. A certain number of survivors, including Kirsten, now grown up, travel up and down Lake Michigan performing music and Shakespeare. Calling themselves the Symphony (some of the characters, like the clarinet, are known to us only by their instruments). They are artists, but they are not naive, and Kirsten has two knives tattooed on her hand, indicating the number of killings she's made.

The story of the Symphony, and their encounter with a group of religious nuts led by "the prophet" is interwoven with what happened before and right after the flu. Jeevan hides out with his brother for weeks in a Toronto apartment as the flu devastates the world. Long before the flu, Leander has mixed feelings about his fame. He marries a woman from his home town in British Columbia, Miranda, who has been working on a comic book called Station Eleven, giving the novel its title and its linchpin, as it will connect two characters at the end. Another part of the book deals with a few hundred survivors trying to make a civilization living in an airport, where an old friend of Leander's makes a museum of items that were pre-flu.

Much of the book is quite wonderful, but it never really came together for me. Mandel uses the old coincidence gambit, as almost everyone in the book has met someone else in the book. The use of the comic book is risky because we can't see it, we can only read its description. It might have been interesting to actually see a comic book as part of the novel. As it is, I could only picture it, and not very well.

I also found the character of Leander tricky. He really wasn't that special--a typical Hollywood star who has married three times, has trouble connecting with his son, and wants to do Shakespeare to hone his craft. Frankly, he's kind of a bore, and those passages about his life dragged the book down a bit. There's a long section that goes by before we get back to the Symphony, and I was happy to be back with them.

This genre of book has been around a long time. The Stand, by Stephen King, is the standard bearer, and Station Eleven makes has much more modest ambitions. It's a good book, but not a great one.