Wow! There are so many things good about Station Eleven that it’s hard to decide where to start. Maybe a good place is to talk about the way it yokes past and future, giving equal weight to both. That’s uncommon in post-apocalypse fiction, which most often slights a fuller past in favor of a drastically reduced future, vide Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Russell Hoban’s Ridley Walker. The past is still a living space in Station Eleven. Not only do the people in the future reflect on it, they are tied to it in small and large ways, from the relationships among the people still living to the recurring references to an old graphic novel, Station Eleven, two issues of which one of the survivors still carries with her and whose message shaped the messianic ideas of a creepy cult preacher who takes over a town and its people and is a menace to everyone else still around.
The book starts with the description of a production of King Lear. Arthur, the actor playing Lear, collapses on stage. Attempts to revive him fail. He dies. A conceit of this production is to put three young girls on stage before the action starts: they are Lear’s daughters –Regan, Goneril and Cordelia-- but as children playing games while their already aging father watches them. The youngest of the girls is escorted from the stage. She doesn‘t really understand what has happened, and soon it won’t matter, because that very day a deadly flu variant finally hits the States. Within a day, a week, a month, not just here in the States, almost everyone is dead. So dies a world. Soon there’s no internet, radio or TV, no phone system, no computers, and no trains, planes, cars, not even gasoline because petrol has a lifespan too before it turns bad. The survivors include the girl who played the child Cordelia when Arthur died. The young man who gave Arthur CPR on stage survives too as do Arthur’s son and one of his three wives.
But it’s a new life they lead. Kirsten is now a grownup actress, a member of the Traveling Orchestra, a collective that travels from settlement to settlement performing one night as an orchestra and the next as actors performing Shakespeare. A sign of the altered life she now leads, Kristen has four knives in a row tattooed on one forearm, one for each marauder she has killed. Carter, Arthur’s childhood friend and then his lawyer in the old world, lives in an abandoned airport now. It was a regional airport. When the flu hit with devastating thoroughness and speed, it the airport was cordoned off to prevent the flu escaping from the terminal but the flu didn‘t strike the people in the airport at all and the quarantine stopped others from bringing it and infecting them.
The story that Station Eleven tells is complicated, even twisty, with repeated steps back and forth between before and after, and shifts in perspective among a large cast of characters. But it all hangs together and the effect is devastating. Mandel is an extraordinarily talented wordsmith. Her images are concrete but evocative, her characters pop off of the page, and there are new discoveries all the way to the end of the book. Station Eleven has already wound up on one paper’s best of the year list –the Washington Post. It has received a National Book Award nomination. One New York Times reviewer didn’t like but the other two did. Read it yourself and see what you think.
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Station Eleven is well written and thought provoking if you take the time.
Station Eleven is a slow simmer of a read. All that was is no more. The world that once was has gone and time has started over. Station Eleven is a patchwork of stories, some intertwining and others merely passing through the night. It flits back and fourth among the characters from before the pandemic to the present. These threads are what loosely binds the story together giving it an elusive sense of connection and impact. If you are an action pack reader, you probably won’t enjoy this book. However, If you are character driven, then perhaps you will.The best parts involved The Traveling Symphony who traveled Toronto and the Great Lake area putting on Shakespeare and playing their instruments in this post apocalyptic world. Art had become magic and almost nostalgic in this brave new world. Then there’s the museum, a collection of every day items that had been abandoned during the mass rush to escape. The museum is a place place to see, touch and remember things the way they used to be. This is vital for all who survived….this need and desire to remember and to be remembered. In the midst of this idyllic recovery an evil lurks… What is the connection? Is there one?Station Eleven is well written and thought provoking if you take the time to read it. It was written in 2014, well before Covid. What if???? I enjoyed the story and it certainly left a bookprint in my mind. I’m glad I took the time to read it.A Simmering ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Top reviews from other countries
Samuel E. Wagar
Astonishing writing, expands the genre
Reviewed in Canada on January 12, 2023
Heinrichson
Eine poetische Reise durch eine fragile postapokalyptische Welt
Reviewed in Germany on December 23, 2023