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.

Written by Max Brooks. Published by Crown Publishers in 2006. 342 pages. Rating: 4/5.

We are living through a pandemic the world hasn’t seen in over a century. COVID-19 has infected over 400,000+ people across 150+ countries. Things are looking bleak as we sit inside our houses under self-quarantine. We are supposed to practice social distancing to limit the spread of the Coronavirus and flatten the curve.

I, like many of you, have a ton of time on my hands since my job has shut its doors to the public. Only essential employees are needed to keep the place running. To pass the time I have a stockpile of books to keep my sanity while I’m keeping away from others. If there’s ever was a time to lounge around reading, now’s the time.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by [Brooks, Max]

The first book I finished since I started to self-quarantine is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks. Brooks helped bring zombie horror into pop-culture in the early 2000s with The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, earning him recognition among horror enthusiasts and the US government. He’s spoken to the US Naval War College and helped organize disaster responses; his website has more information about the projects he’s worked on. Coincidentally, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross just released an interview with Brooks yesterday discussing an upcoming book of his and how the US has responded to the Coronavirus. I highly recommend this forty-minute podcast, Brooks provides valuable insight into today’s pandemic and his books.

When you think of a zombie book, you might envision something like Dawn of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, or The Walking Dead. You have a group of survivors hold up in some building while the dead rattle the doors and windows. Brooks takes that trope and goes in a different direction. In World War Z he takes the threat of a zombie apocalypse seriously and imagines what would happen on a world-wide scale.

The main premise of the book is that humanity won the zombie war and an intrepid reporter is traveling around to create an oral history of the war. The narrator interviews dozens of veterans of the zombie war who gives us an understanding of how humanity fought back. The series of interviews begin with a doctor who first investigated the virus in rural China and quickly progresses to how the virus spread. Then the book covers people’s response to the zombie virus, what different countries did to combat the undead, etc…

World War Z tells a social history of this fictional zombie war. The use of interviews makes the whole book seem real. There are few instances of your cliché survivors getting overrun by a zombie horde. Most of the interviews tell stories that you might not think about during a zombie apocalypse. Brooks talks about how society would shift to favor people who know how to work with their hands. He talks how the ineptitude of a bureaucracy could hamper disaster response. There are real issues hidden behind this fictional zombie apocalypse novel.

One of the events that stood out to me is the battle of Yonkers. The United States wanted to stage a highly publicized battle against the undead outside of New York City. They had about a thousand infantry armed with high-tech gadgets, supported by tanks and air, and still lost. It’s not so much the battle itself that stands out to me, but the United States’ reliance on technology when waging war. Brooks uses this fictional battle to highlight the United States’ hubris in believing technology wins wars. Sure it plays a big part, but other factors go into winning a war. Especially with an enemy who won’t ever surrender.

Overall, this book was a fun, quick read. It’s approach to the zombie apocalypse stands out as realistic, but not so much to make it boring. Brooks is an excellent writer and his expertise is shown throughout this book. I don’t think I’ll read his other zombie books like The Zombie Survival Guide or The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks, but that’s because I got a ton of other books on my list. The 2013 movie adaptation is worth a watch too, though it is an imperfect rendition of the book I reviewed here.

Stay safe and don’t get infected with the Coronavirus.
Do you have any books you plan on reading during this time of social distancing? Let me know in the comments!