Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4/5 cats
Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.
on the night the world begins to end, a man has a heart attack and dies onstage while performing the lead role in king lear. considering that shortly after this, the georgia flu will have killed off 99% of the population and changed the world as we know it forever, it seems unlikely that he would be remembered among so many millions dead. but that’s the kind of book this is. the story of the people who have touched our lives in unexpected ways, an echoing world in which Hell is the absence of the people you long for, where the little things – or the memories of them – matter the most.
arthur leander is a famous hollywood actor with three ex-wives, a son he never sees, a lover, a friend who knew him when, and various people to whom he has been kind, careless, or otherwise meaningful, including a little girl who watches him die beside her onstage, and the paparazzo turned paramedic who tried to save his life.
twenty years later, pieces of arthur still remain in the wasteland – in the memories of survivors, in his blood, in the provenance of talismanic objects, and in the ripple effect of events he set in motion when he was still alive. this is a multiple POV novel that jumps back and forth in time, from arthur’s rise to fame and the stories of those he loved and lost along the way, to the stories of the survivors, finding and creating meaning in the ashes.
Kirsten and August walked mostly in silence. A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. 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?
kirsten is the little girl who was onstage with arthur when he died, and is now a grown woman touring the wasteland with a group of musicians and actors known as “the traveling symphony”, bringing entertainment to the scattered settlements. she has a tattoo on her arm with a quote from a remembered star trek episode: Because survival is insufficient, and this is one of the major preoccupations of the novel – the importance of art and a shared cultural history to those who remain. whether it is the objects collected in the “museum of civilization,” the persistence of shakespeare, the significance of portions of a tattered comic book (from which this novel draws its name) in the hands of two different characters who will take from it wildly different meanings, or even the memory of star trek, these are the things that connect those who are left. it is the tenacity of what remains, what endures, and what can still be done with it – the clinging to what makes us human – to what matters in the aftermath, and to what binds us together.
that’s not to say this is a gentle apocalypse solely concerned with maintaining cultural heritage. there are dangers everywhere in a world without pharmaceuticals or technology, a world in which a lack of codified behavior can make a man believe he is a prophet, and to give his dark vision free reign.
it’s a stunner, straight up. and between this and california, it’s a great time to be a woman writing lit-dystopias. i have read oh-so-many post-apocalyptic novels, but mandel managed to show me something new. she writes a complicated, multivoiced story in the fragments we are allowed to see – the slices of experience from both before and after the cataclysm, where a dinner party scene is just as interesting and fraught with tension as anything from the early days of the disease, and there are so many unforgettable jewels of moments: jeevan and his wheelchair-bound brother trying to wait out the plague, a quarantined plane on the edge of the tarmac, the memory of oranges.
she has such a strong, wonderful voice and has created tender and sympathetic characters who may be deeply flawed, but are the very personification(s) of the stubbornness of humanity.
one of the things that surprised me is that more wasn’t made of the king lear parallels. i mean arthur had three wives, lear had three daughters – and since there are so many references to shakespeare throughout, both overt and oblique (one of arthur’s wives is named miranda, another is elizabeth(ian), one of the section titles is a midsummer night’s dream, the georgia flu is somewhat analogous to the black plague of shakespeare’s time) i feel like it would have given the novel another layer of ka-pow to have developed the theme even further. but no – one of arthur’s wives doesn’t even appear in the book except a brief mention that she existed. and – jeez – would it have killed mandel to have given v. a chapter??? you know we want to know more about that situation!!
but these are just minor quibbles over an incredibly intelligent and gripping novel. and we can still have a little fun with names here, exclusive of shakespeare – if we play a little free-association game with most-notably-named, “arthur leander” roughly translates into “king of tragic lovers.” which is apt.
two quick notes: if you don’t want a very popular four-year-old book that – yes, i know, i probably should have read already – spoiled for you, don’t read the acknowledgments. because- yeah. oops. that was me.
and if the graphic novel that plays such an important role in this book is NOT picked up by someone and published as a companion book, it will be a huge missed opportunity. because we want it. bad.
