Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
I have been intending to read Station Eleven for a while now, having seen good reviews about it and indications that it would be the type of dystopian fiction I typically enjoy. However, I will admit that I had been putting off picking it up due to a wariness of read a dystopian narrative surrounding a global pandemic. Although I had read one by accident when I picked up Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, it had been an uncomfortable read and I wanted to make sure that I was ready to engage with the narrative before actually diving into St. John Mandel’s books. Although there is a definite sense of eeriness to the similarities in the narrative to the covid pandemic, I found that I really enjoyed Station Eleven, particularly the storyline following the orchestra in the years after the pandemic.
Station Eleven opens with a performance of King Lear, during which Arthur Leander, the famous actor playing King Lear, has a heart attack on stage and dies. That night, it becomes known that a deadly virus known as the Georgia Flu is spreading faster than the hospitals can keep up, changing life as it had been known up until that point as the world’s infrastructure completely collapses. Twenty years later, one of the child actors from that production of King Lear, Kirsten, has become part of a travelling orchestra and actors, making their way to the Museum of Civilization. However, during the journey, members of the group start to go missing, taken by a cult lead by someone who has an interesting connection with the comic book Kirsten has been holding onto ever since the night that Arthur Leander died, entitled Station Eleven.
Given that Station Eleven was published in 2014, it is incredible how close to reality St. John Mandel was in her portrayal of how a deadly flu-like pandemic would spread. Although the infrastructure did not fail in real life in 2020 in the same way it fails in Station Eleven, there were still many similarities and situations that did happen, giving an extra layer of eeriness to the overall narrative. However, the focus of Station Eleven is not so much on the dystopian, post-apocalyptic setting, but on the characters and how they have responded to the ways in which the world has changed. To show this, St. John Mandel gives the reader the opportunity to see the characters in the ‘before’ and ‘after’, but she does not simplify it by showing the characters to have had perfect, enjoyable lives before and terrible lives after. Instead, she shows the complexities, flaws, and challenges of each character’s life before the pandemic, and then shows how those experiences have influenced who they are in the time after the pandemic.
The parts of the narrative that followed the post-apocalyptic journey of the Travelling Symphony were my favourite, both for the interactions between the characters and how it gave St. John Mandel scope to explore the new world that had been built. In a few pages, St. John Mandel was able to establish the orchestra and actors as characters who had been on the road together for a long time and had their own set of relationships, problems, and disagreements. Although the reader does not spend much time with the group before members start disappearing, St. John Mandel is able to establish the relationships to the point that the reader is able to understand how each of the characters, and the group as a whole, reacts to the stressful situation.
Overall, I really enjoyed Station Eleven and I will definitely be picking up the rest of the interconnected novels by St. John Mandel in the near future. I thought this was an engaging, well-written portrayal of a dystopia that is perhaps not too far off what might have happened in 2020 had things been a little different. I would recommend this for those who enjoy dystopian fiction which leans more literary, such as Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, but also for those who enjoy media such as the TV series Revolution, which has a similar post-apocalyptic setting. I am looking forward to reading more of this world in St. John Mandel’s other books within this loosely connected series.
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