"Station Eleven" by Emily St John Mandel, 2014
This book has been on my shelf for a few years now after I picked it up from Barnes and Noble. I had no notion of what it's about, other than it is science fiction, a winner of various awards, and its callbacks to Star Trek: Voyager. Upon seeing commercials and learning of its adaptation to a television series, I decided now is the time to read the book before the tv series is released.
The story is less science and more fiction. "Station Eleven" is as much a mystery as it is a post-apocalyptic tale, and the author is pretty good at giving enough clues that thicken the plot to keep me reading. The stories of all the characters are told beautifully intertwined and in multiple timelines centering around Arthur Leander. The book opens at the onset of an outbreak of a virulent flu. In a matter of weeks, it will quickly decimate the world's population. In its wake is a place that is disconnected, desperate and dangerous, with small communities of people trying to make their way in this brave new world.
One of the things I struggled with reading this is wrapping my head around what was happening and when because it's set over so many timelines and tricky to track. Because so many past events influence future events, having a good idea of the chronological sequence is really important. The easiest way to trace the chronological order of events is by following the critical characters over time- make some notes or diagrams.
Where the book falters, I think, is in its imagination of disaster. Having accepted the science that says a flu pandemic is highly probable in our future, Mandel chooses a worst possible situation, a plague that results in the immediate and total collapse of civilization. But the survivors do not think, act or speak like people struck by such a cataclysm. For the most part, they do not behave very differently from people living in ordinary, civilized times. Hunger, thirst, and exhaustion are alluded to, but there is no penetrating sense of the day-to-day struggle of vulnerable human beings lacking the basic amenities of life.
On another level, Station Eleven is not so much about an apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning; the effort of art to deepen our fleeting impressions of the world and bolster our solitude. Mandel evokes the weary feeling of life slipping away, for Arthur as an individual and then writ large upon the entire world. In Year Twenty, Kirsten, who was eight when the flu hit, is interviewed about her memories, and says that the new reality is hardest to bear for those old enough to remember how the world was before. "The more you remember, the more you've lost," she explains – a sentiment that could apply to any of us, here and now.
I give this book a 3 out of 5 stars.
