Station Eleven

This is a thoughtful, emotional book that I think does a pretty good job of thinking both practically and romantically about an apocalypse-style scenario. The people living post-apocalypse kill people and hunt for their dinner, but they also play music and put on Shakespeare.

I love the way the characters' stories intersect. It feels very satisfying, as a reader, to have two characters you don't expect to meet to finally meet. I found the flashbacks interesting and well-balanced with the post-apocalypse plot. Well, what little plot there is. This book is very much character-driven, rather than action-driven, which I think is totally fine but you should be prepared for before you read it. If you are looking for fast-paced action adventure, don't read this book.

To me, someone who reads mostly fantasy, this felt very literary. I think it's a great book for someone who mostly reads genre fiction but would like to make the foray into literature. It does an excellent job bridging the gap.

I usually have a special affinity for dystopian novels with a literary style rather than a thriller plot, but this one just didn't work for me. The structure of jumping from pre-collapse to post-collapse was distracting and kept me from getting into the characters enough to keep their plot lines straight. There were some very beautiful, lyrical passages, but I was expecting more after all the buzz online surrounding this novel. It wouldn't be my first choice if I were asked for a recommendation of a good dystopian novel.

Survival is insufficient.

In speculative fiction, I think we as readers forget that to survive humans must do more than live, humans need to thrive. Humans need to explore and challenge ourselves, to watch sunsets, be moved, and feel joy. Humans need more than to breathe. Good fiction knows this but great fiction, like Station 11, explores this.

The story of Station 11 starts with multiple endings.

A play of King Lear at a Toronto Theater where 51-year-old Arthur Leander has his final moments on stage after suffering a major heart attack. That was his end.

A man runs on to the stage and attempts to save Arthur. In this moment of heroism, his wandering has ceased. It has ended. He has found his calling.

A little girl watches the death of Arthur followed by the end of life as she knows it. Her childhood has ended.

The first cases of superflu affect people. This ends in a worldwide pandemic that decimates that human population, cities, culture, and infrastructure. This is the end of human civilization as we know it.

The world ends, not with a bang but a cough.

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.

Endings are important in fiction, they are the culmination of something. But, an ending is only a moment, a person dying on stage, a man running to save him, a little girl weeping in the wings, and the two weeks that followed. These moments are like stones dropped into a pond. It isn't so much about the stones as it is about all the ripples sent out from it. The endings are the springboards for beginnings and that in this novel is the important part.

We move forward twenty years and meet Kirsten who was the little girl who witnessed the death of Arthur. She is now a 28-year-old actor and part of the Traveling Symphony. A group of artists dedicated to performing Shakespeare and traveling around from city to city. They sing for their supper, but more than that they give a peek into something that is more than the drudgery of day to day. What in the world is more magnificent and resembles the height of human culture than Shakespeare?

I will not say any more about the plot. First, this is an intricately woven plot and surmising it any further than the blurb does the story injustice. There are too many small pieces. Second, this is a highly atmospheric novel. It is not so much about the words themselves, but the mental image the excellent storytelling it evokes. I couldn't do it justice in a paragraph about plot highlights even if I wanted to.

Here is where I think this story is brilliant and surpasses many other speculative stories and should be read. It is the celebration of art and humanities. Art is such a human thing and it shines a light on the darkness of an apocalypse. There is so much dark, and drudgery in surviving. Find food and shelter... repeat. That isn't important. It is the moments of joy and bliss that should be celebrated. Find hope amongst the shadows, find light in the dark. Celebrate that joy and write a story about that. That is what Station 11 is. It is a light on the darkness. I hope you read it and are as moved as I was.

This is a school text for my son next year and I couldn't resist reading it from the blurb alone.

Considering the impact Covid is having on the world at the moment, reading this is chilling, as it's a dystopian novel where a Georgia flu similar to SARS wipes out civilisation and those who survive are left to face challenges and the memories of what they once had.

Such a riveting read.

This review may be slightly biased because I love this book. Like I really really love this book. Okay first thing is it's a post apocalyptic novel. But it's so believable. We don't have any of this phone signals turning people into zombies, or aliens invading or nuclear detonations. It's just a really really bad virus that kills almost everyone. I mean if Ebola or some other virus gets worse that could actually happen. It sort of did happen once with the Spanish Flu.

I love that it's sci-fi but not really. Actually its barely sci-fi. This is the sort of book I would recommend for people who don't like sci-fi. I mean yes a good part of the book is set in a post-apocalyptic world, but it's still not sci-fi. Apart from a new virus it really doesn't have any new science in it. Its really more a story about a bunch of people living in a world with no electricity, no medicine, no internet, no anything basically.

But the one thing I love most about this book (and I may start rambling here) is that is has a reference to Star Trek Voyager. This is probably no secret but I am a huge Star Trek Voyager nerd. One thing that annoys me when any media makes a reference to Star Trek is that they forget there is more to Star Trek than James T Kirk. I mean there are five Star Trek television series (six if you include the animated series), not to mention the movies. And yet when there is any mention of Star Trek in pop culture you can bet it will be referencing The Original Series.

So the fact that Emily St John Mandel referenced ST: Voyager and not only that but it explains a huge part of the book. That one tiny line explains the entire reason why there is a shakespeare company travelling around North America and Canada. That was the moment I fell in love with this book.

Station Eleven takes you through a worldwide pandemic through the eyes of the acquaintances of an actor in his later years. We meet these characters as we learn about Arthur's hometown, college escape, trials and errors, rise to fame, and eventually his death on stage which we see in the opening chapters.

We learn the fates of many of these characters that somehow influenced or were a part of Arthur's life. We see how the world is reborn as the characters adapt to the new life after the pandemic. This is a book about characters and their growth.

My favorite parts of the book is when we follow the traveling symphony. This group of people that have decided to make music and art in the new world. While most of the world hunkers down and shuts people out, the symphony wants to share and bring joy. Survival is Insufficient.

I just finished Station Eleven- a decidedly un-Christmasy read written in 2014- that is Get This- about a Pandemic.
This pandemic was far worse than the one we experienced in 2020.

This one felled society.
Imagine so many people dead so fast that in a few weeks time there is no more electricity.
No more gasoline.
No more air travel, space travel.
All of it. GONE.

This book is brilliantly crafted- the Post Technology World that Emily St. John Mandel has drawn has been so clearly and accurately illustrated.

Is this what our world would be like if 99% of the population died?

And yet for all this doomsday plague horror- somehow, some way, this story is beautiful and soothing.

I think perhaps because the reader learns that in the face of such inestimable loss, what truly matters is our collective humanity. The beauty is in how those left after the Georgia Flu has run through the planet, decide how they will move forward, how they will connect, how they will live.


I felt inexorably pulled into this post-pandemic hellscape -into a future that somehow elicited no fear just profound appreciation for our collective human experience.
Highly Recommended Read.

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.

Hovering in between a 3.5 and a 4.

If I had read this book a year ago, I would've just been meh about it. But because I'm reading this book now, today, in the tail end of 2020 - it hits real hard.

Arthur Leander is an ageing, has-been Hollywood star who one day collapses on stage from a heart attack and dies, just hours before the world starts to end from... a virus. A very rapidly-spreading flu virus that infects and almost immediately kills so many people that civilisation as we know it end within days of the epidemic beginning. Twenty years later, we follow Kirsten Raymonde who is member of the Travelling Symphony, a nomadic theatre troupe that goes around to pockets of people who have managed to carve out a living for themselves in the empty and battered post-apocalyptic world and put on Shakespearean plays for them.

The writing of this book was beautiful, wistful, and asks so many questions that are almost heart-wrenchingly relevant today - shall we say, almost prophetic considering St. John Mandel wrote this in 2014?

Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life.

... the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before...

Kirsten realises that the Prophet was quoting passages from the Station Eleven comics, and she starts reciting them as well - it could've been a really cool scene where he responds in some way, whether in quoting back the lines at her, or even just eyes widening in recognition, before he gets shot by the boy. It'd be like Kirsten finding out that this really weird, deranged dude is a tenuous link to her past and then having him snuffed out in front of her eyes.

Fairly enjoyable read, however I had a hard time connecting with the characters and some of the details of the Georgian flu “apocalypse” really nagged me. This part was pretty poorly done and I am really surprised by the number of readers that were not bothered at all by the many inconsistencies in regards to this. If I weren't so bothered by the lack of intelligence in her vision of this catastrophe, I might have enjoyed it more.

Somewhere between three and four stars(Don't really want to give it the 4 because two big aspects of it were a bit weak). Pretty prose and a tightly woven story, backed by themes of life, art, time, and relationships. Some prose seemed a little recycled or overused, but that's a small fault in a well written novel. The biggest problem Station Eleven has is that it has maybe one character that I actually cared about, and several that I only had to pay attention to because they were vehicles for elements of the story. It was Miranda. Overalll the book was creative in a lot of ways, especially considering the post apocalyptic setting that's so stale nowadays. Even so, that aspect of the novel was still kind of weak. I adored the parallel between the comics and life.