Station Eleven’s set up is typical for a post-apocalyptic story: worldwide epidemic (in this case, the Georgia Flu) wipes out nearly everyone (in this case, 99%) in a short amount of time (in this case, less than a week). Lucky survivors toughen up or die in the new world, quickly learning how to live without modern technology, grieving their lost loved ones–and lost comforts–and try to figure out what’s next for themselves and humanity. Babies are born, people band together, life is brutal and often short. Settlements spring up where people land–airports, gas stations. Old World technologies–fancy preserved food, batteries, clothes, plastics, bullets–are used up, worn down, cherished.
Mandel takes this and does something…well, it’s not quite new, but it’s definitely good. After all, a story is in the telling. She shifts in the storytelling: apocalypse, post-apocalypse, pre-apocalypse, slowly filling in the blanks and coloring in the connections between survivors, lovers, ex-wives, casual acquaintances, objects that have touched many hands and made it to the end of the world. The end result is incredibly satisfying–honestly, more satisfying than I thought it would be!
We start with a famous actor, Arthur Leander, performing King Lear on stage in Toronto, who drops dead on stage. Papparazzo-turned-EMT Jeevan Choudhury rushes to his side but is unable to save him, and briefly comforts one of the small child actors, Kirsten. Mandel gradually and deliberately introduces us to Arthur’s three ex-wives (pre-apocalypse), a roving band of musicians and actors called the Symphony (post-apocalypse), an enigmatic and creepy figure known only as The Prophet (post-), and Arthur’s oldest friend Clark, who straddles pre- and post-. There are a lot of musings on the lasting impressions and value of culture, both Shakespearean and pop (“Survival is insufficient” is the Symphony’s motto, taken from Star Trek), and Mandel’s exploration of friendship, love, and regret rings true.
I almost felt there were a few too many convenient coincidences–I mean, what are the chances that so many people had connections to Arthur Leander? And I am wary of plots that rely heavily on A Famous Celebrity to show the connections between characters and comment on Modern Society and Celebrity Culture–it so often seems like a storytelling cop out. But Mandel does this so well, using the celebrity connections to highlight, and not ham-handedly, how much coincidences, relationships, and, well, things, matter–that personal project no one else seems to care about, that object that you keep just because it’s beautiful, those letters you jot off and forget about, the woman who handed you this morning’s coffee (and, in fact, this morning’s coffee itself, a miracle of connectivity across a huge planet.)
Mandel also does a great job of addressing, sometimes indirectly and without answers, Apocalypse Questions: Where is God in all this? Where do we go from here? What do we teach our children about the old world? Do we, right now, rely too much on technology? What do people do when they’ve lost everything?
Station Eleven is well-plotted, well-paced, and, importantly, tender. It’s thoughtful and smart, and after I got over my initial distrust of the celebrity trope, I thoroughly enjoyed it.