2019 read #22: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
336 pages
Published 2014
Read from December 19 to December 21
Rating: 4 out of 5

It's strange to read about apocalypses when you're living through one. The climate is changing, the obscenely rich hold all the power, right-wing authoritarianism is triumphant around the globe. Species and ecosystems are dying everywhere. The oceans are acid, whole continents are burning. The apocalypse is no longer science fiction. Novels about it feel all too real, more like "ripped from the headlines" current events than entertainment. Yet it almost seems quaint, during the slow collapse of capitalism and the slow apocalypse of carbon dioxide, to read about civilization falling due to a sudden, sweeping pandemic.

The Georgia Flu that kills most of humanity in Station Eleven feels like a throwback to Captain Tripps. At first not much seems to distinguish Mandel's pandemic die-off from the one in The Stand, aside from the salient fact that Mandel is a better writer than Stephen King and can construct a riveting story without resorting to Magical Black Folk plot devices. But as Station Eleven slips with precision between time periods—the final night before the collapse, its immediate aftermath, twenty years afterward, the years before it—the story Mandel wants to tell sketches a much different, much odder shape.

Station Eleven uses a population bottleneck event to examine ideas of fame and immortality, about art and what is worth remembering, about the stories that speak to us and the stories we shape with others. It took a while for me to understand where Mandel was going when she interrupted the tense adventures of the post-apocalyptic Traveling Symphony to depict in detail the (somewhat cliched) tabloid love life of an Old Hollywood-style Leading Man, a character type already anachronistic in 2014. But Mandel's strengths as a storyteller gave me confidence that she would tie it all together in a satisfactory way. My one complaint, funny enough, is the opposite of what one might say about a Stephen King tome: there are too few characters, even in the pre-pandemic years, making it feel like the entire post-apocalyptic world revolves around one tabloid-staple actor who died the night of the collapse, one artist who at one point was his wife, and another ex-wife with whom the actor had a son. And while the non-linear structure was accomplished beautifully, I felt that certain stories within the timeline—particularly that of Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony, twenty years after the Flu—weren't given enough space and didn't add up to much. But stylistically and emotionally, Station Eleven is a gorgeous work that tells the sort of tales not usually associated with the apocalypse.