Written by Emily St. John Mandel. Published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2014. 333 pages. Rating: 4/5.

Introduction:

Have you ever wondered what life would be like if you survived the apocalypse?  Would you be duking it out in the Thunderdome against some four-armed mutants?  Maybe you’d be scavenging in the ruins of an old Walmart for cans of Boston baked beans. 

In this Arthur C. Clarke Award winning novel Emily St. John Mandel imagines a world after a deadly virus called the Georgian Flu devastates the world. The virus kills 99% of the world’s population, leaving very few survivors to make sense of the world after. Mandel’s storytelling weaves forward and backwards in time to tell an engaging story about life, death, and what it means to live.

Brief Synopsis:

Station Eleven begins with a performance of King Lear in a Toronto theater.  Arthur Leander, an older A-list actor, plays the starring role. Midway through his rendition of King Lear, Arthur suffers a fatal heart attack.  Fellow actors are stunned, the audience confused, all the while the Georgian Flu descends upon the world. Within a month of Arthur’s death, the world has forever changed.. Nothing will be the same.

The story jumps ahead twenty years to the perspective of Kirsten Raymonde.  She was an eight year old child actor in that Toronto theater two decades ago.  Now she’s a twenty-eight year old badass a part of a group of traveling actors and musicians called The Traveling Symphony.  They migrate around the Great Lakes area of what used to be the United States performing Shakespeare. Their motto, “survival is insufficient,” is painted on the side of one of their caravan. It’s a quote from Star Trek: Voyager and strikes at the heart of this book.

After getting introduced to Kirsten and the other members of the Traveling Symphony we learn they are headed towards St. Deborah by the Water. There they hope to stage a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and see some old friends they left there years ago.

However, once they get to town, everything is different. There’s less people, more armed guards, and many new faces. Their friends are also nowhere to be found.

After questioning some of the townsfolk who stayed, Kirsten and the symphony find out a cult took over the town months ago. A man proclaiming to be a prophet rules St. Deborah by gun and bullet. Those who don’t bend to his will are exiled, or worse. Luckily, the former symphony members fled town soon after the prophet arrived.

Rumor has it the former symphony members fled towards a city called The museum of Civilization. It’s a village built into an airport with a collection of pre-flu memorabilia. The Traveling Symphony head out towards the museum, but along the way find a stowaway in one of their wagons. This triggers a feud between the Traveling Symphony and the prophet. A manhunt ensures. The story goes on.

Thoughts:

Station Eleven is a complex book with a ton of layers. It makes it difficult to fully encapsulate the story and plot lines of the book because Mandel jumps around the timeline constantly. The book begins as the pandemic begins, then jumps twenty years in the future, then back twenty, then forward fifteen, etc…

The nonlinear storyline is a major plus because we get a better understanding of the main characters and how they react to the apocalypse. By the end of the book we get a history of all the major characters, like Arthur, Kirsten, the prophet, and more. The way everthing connects together by the end is satisfying.

If you’re looking for a book about the end of the world or how the world ends, look elsewhere. Unlike other apocalypse novels, such as Max Brooks’ World War Z, Station Eleven focuses on the aftermath of the apocalypse. In an NPR interview about her book, Mandel says:

“I very purposely set much of the action 15 and then 20 years after that flu pandemic. And the reason for that is that I feel that most dystopian fiction tends to dwell on that immediate aftermath of horror and mayhem. What I was really interested in and writing about was what’s the new culture and the new world that begins to emerge?” -Emily St. John Mandel

Survival Is Insufficient: ‘Station Eleven’ Preserves Art After The Apocalypse

The new culture that emerges after the end of the world circles around the idea that survival is insufficient. The Traveling Symphony are actors and musicians, jobs you might not think would be necessary for survival in a post-apocalyptic world.

But what kind of life would people be living without art? Without Music? Without some form of entertainment?

You might have an okay life, it might be a little boring. It might be nasty, brutish, and short. Without the arts life would be missing something important. Survival alone isn’t sufficient.

I thought this book was a wonderful read. If you’re into dystopian or post-apocalyptic novels, this book will be a nice change of pace for you. It subverted my expectations and I didn’t think I’d enjoy it as much as I did.

Do you have any books in mind that challenged your expectations? Any books that took a familiar genre and flipped it on its side? Let me know in the comments.