Station Eleven

Survival is Insufficient
Emily St. John Mandel's fourth novel Station Eleven was granted the National Book Award's shortlist for fiction. At first glance Station Eleven appears to be a post-apocalyptic genre novel. A world devastated by a flu epidemic. Small bands of survivors regressing back to a “Walking Dead” type of existence. Ferals” roam the country, religious cults attack passive communities and starvation is a constant threat. But this isn't a normal genre novel. For a start the imaginative scope of the novel is significant. It's a story about celebrity, memory and how ordinary people relate to each other. The pandemic is just a way of framing these interactions.

One person, Arthur, is a central figure. He connects to most of the other characters in one way or another. And Emily St. John Mandel writes about these connections in a literary way. This makes the conventional characters portrayed interesting. They aren't unique, wild, crazy or particularly fascinating.

The book also employs many flashbacks. This has the effect of telling the story in a non-chronological way; rather like a jigsaw. The bigger picture reveals itself as the reader bounces back and forwards through time. This device compensates for the lack of a gripping story arc. Yet this isn't a criticism, the fact that the book is so readable is down to the skill of the author.

Where the book struggles is in its depiction of the disaster itself. Many technical details about the post-apocalyptic world don't quite work. For example, technology grinds to a halt because of a lack of electricity or skilled engineers to maintain the infrastructure. Why? What about solar panels? Even if 99% of the population was wiped out, this assumes that only people without any tangible technical skills remain. This especially doesn't ring true when the story introduces hundreds of people living at an airport. Surely someone could get the power running again? Also, apart from the token bad guys who eventually make an appearance the survivors are all so pleasant. For the most part they act like they would have before the cataclysm. The author gives the reader a few hints about their day to day struggles but glosses over how they survive.

At the end of the book I was left with a clear conclusion. It's the people you spend your life with that are important along with the values you hold, not the material goods you own. If you can get past the lack of robust world-building and the civility of it all then this restrained story will reinforce the belief that its our relationships that sustain us.