I was three-quarters through Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven before the panic set in. Up until that point, I was engrossed in Mandel’s tale about an apocalyptic pandemic that killed 99% of those who contracted it, but it hadn’t gotten under my skin per se. In this world, only small groups of people survived the devastating and quick-killing flu, and all the features of civilization had disappeared: electricity, motorized transportation and airplanes, medical facilities, communications, and mechanized industry. As I read on, Mandel’s detailed writing about what had been lost, what it was like in this ravaged world, helped me really envision what an event like this would be like. And of course our own recent pandemic was on my mind as well. All this came together to create a feeling of great dread; the world she created became plausible enough to freak me out.
The story revolves around multiple characters, both their lives before the pandemic and after. Some of the main characters are an aging actor in a play production before the pandemic hits, a young girl in the same play, a budding EMT, the actor’s lovers and ex-wives, and his best friend. The book goes back and forth in time, which is a little tricky to keep track of, but it really fleshes out the characters’ pasts and future in the wasteland civilization becomes.
Station Eleven is a mythical world created by one of the actor’s ex-wives, who creates a comic about a station lost in space that is inhabited by those in limbo between their old home on earth and the current world and undersea citizens who live underwater who long to return to the surface and eventually earth. The comic is obviously a parallel to the characters’ situation and makes its way into various hands, most importantly to the young girl who hooks up with a traveling symphony and theater group after the pandemic. The young actor’s story is told twenty years after the pandemic, as the symphony makes its way across the land, stopping in towns to perform. At one stop they encounter a violent cult leader known as the prophet, who leads his followers from place to place, accumulating weapons and child brides. The symphony harbors a young girl the prophet wants for a wife, so the cult kidnaps members of the symphony and trails the caravan in the hopes of bartering their hostages for the young girl. The prophet’s travels weave throughout the book.
Mandel does a phenomenal job in creating both a recognizable and unrecognizable apocalyptic world. The settlements, especially one that exists in an airport, contrast with the desolation of abandoned houses, cars, and businesses, many of them filled with the skeletons of the dead. She sets up a pretty convincing survival structure for those that live through the pandemic, sketching out how they get food, the building of shelters, the resources for medical care. There are some unrealistic spots (one character puts together a makeshift printing press to print newspapers), but overall the world is convincing.
Characters criss-cross and connect in all kinds of ways, which gives coherence to the whole. The characters are well drawn, even the minor ones, and Mandel excels at showing the human impact and trauma of such a disaster. I don’t read many dystopian books, but this is a great one.