Survival is insufficient

Back in 2015, my mom picked me up a copy of Emily St. John Mandel's new-at-the-time novel Station Eleven. I remember the dates because my copy of the book still has the bookmark in it from the 2015 Nantucket Book Festival. I am extremely bad about reading the books I acquire on a timely basis; I always intend to read them soon and they get lost in my tsundoku of a TBR pile, sorry.

 

Anyway, Station Eleven won a lot of awards and generally made a big splash even in the non-sci-fi literary world when it came out. When sci-fi is popular among non-sci-fi types I always get a little suspicious, but sometimes that suspicion is baseless. This turned out to be one of those times.

 

Station Eleven is, unsurprisingly, a space station; because I did not read the back cover real good when I first got the book, I had been under the impression that at least part of this book takes place in space. It does not. The space station known as Station Eleven is fictional, the eponymous location of a comic book series that one of the main characters in the novel Station Eleven writes. The novel Station Eleven takes place here on Earth, after the apocalypse.

 

There are many apocalypses based on current political things that one could choose to explore when writing a post-apocalyptic novel; Mandel goes the fast route with antibiotic resistance. A supervirus known as the Georgia Flu strikes Russia and Georgia (the country, not the U.S. state), then is quickly exported via air travel to France, Canada, and everywhere else. This flu pandemic is sort of like a regular flu pandemic but more; once exposed, it incubates in a few hours, and the person is usually violently sick for about a day or two until they die. Unlike the sorts of apocalypses we are likely actually staring down the barrel of, this one cut down 99% of the world's population in a matter of weeks. The collapse was fast; too fast for anyone to try to organize around or adjust to. A small, stubbornly political part of my brain wanted to be mad about that: It effectively solved climate change overnight as all industrial emissions ended; real social collapse doesn't happen that fast; society is collapsing now and I still have to go to work. (I have been in A Mood lately.) But eventually I got over that bit of grumping and accepted that the premise was the premise: The book is exploring what the apocalypse would look like if it did happen fast; the role that the giant mass of humanity plays in keeping all the supposedly technological, automated aspects of civilization going. 

 

As any leftist knows, that role is not just important; it is ultimate. When the plague hits, civilization doesn't fall because the owners of the means of production aren't around to own them anymore. It's because the doctors caring for the sick all fall sick, the electrical workers that keep the grid running, the news reporters and editors and production assistants that keep people informed, the pilots that flew planes back and forth, the truck drivers and logistics managers that got food from the countryside into the city's stores. With no one to do the work, civilization effectively ends in a matter of days. 

 

The book jumps around a lot, following a handful of viewpoint characters at various times before and after the flu hits. The central character, though he's only a viewpoint character for a few chapters, is a very famous actor named Arthur Leander. The other viewpoint characters are his first wife, Miranda; his college best friend, Clark; the eight-year-old child actress in his final performance of King Lear, Kristen, who joins a traveling theater troupe after the apocalypse; and Jeevan, a paramedic and former papparazzo who, in addition to having papparazz-ed Leander quite a bit during that time in his life, tries to save him when he has a heart attack on stage the night the flu hits. 

 

Some of these folks knew each other and some of them didn't, and some of them knew each other well and others met only in passing. But as the book unfolds, vignette by vignette, the connections between the characters all pull together. Arthur, of course, doesn't survive past the first chapter, keeling over dead on a stage in Toronto just hours before the flu hits, but most of the others survive -- as do a host of other characters, such as Leander's second wife and his eight-year-old son. 

 

Station Eleven is the longtime project of Arthur's first wife, Miranda. She works on it for years and years and eventually self-publishes a few prints of the first two volumes. It's a comic book series about a group of people who live on a space station that fell through a wormhole and can't get back to Earth. Two copies, at least, survive the apocalypse; Kristen has one of them. Bits and pieces of Miranda's life make it into the comic: The office where she works as an administrative assistant with not enough work to do; a dreadful dinner party in Hollywood. 

 

Miranda might have been my favorite character, which may say more about me and where I am in my life right now than about the book itself, but whatever. Miranda made me want to start writing again; made me want to figure out a way to use the downtime at my own workplace to write, instead of all the other things I fill that downtime with. I fill it with everything except writing, I swear.

 

Anyway. Back to the book itself. It sort of meanders along in fragments, which fits very well with the world it takes place in and the characters' relationship to that world. All the instant connectedness that characterizes modern life is gone, and what's left is uncertain, disjointed, disconcerting, and often violent. People go mad; people start cults and stuff.

 

One of these cults is at the root of what serves as a plot; this isn't an enormously plot-driven book, but the traveling symphony's usual travels are interrupted by running across a town run by a judgmental weirdo known only as "the prophet." The prophet has some Book of Revelation-based creed about how the plague was a divine punishment and only the righteous can continue to live, which conveniently means the cult has a free pass to kill anyone it deems unrighteous, which it can tell, as cults usually can, by such unmistakable signs as "disagreeing with the cult leader" and "not doing exactly what we tell you" and, most severely, "trying to leave the cult." The cult is tiresomely unoriginal, as cults often are, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous to our traveling artists. It was trivially easy to figure out who the prophet really was, but that's also fine, since Mandel doesn't really hang a great deal of importance on keeping it secret from the reader. 

 

If you are a sort of anxious-minded person like me, the main thing this book does is make you stop and think about how prepared you are for a mass die-off; for me, the answer is very much "not very." I would hate to be trapped in my apartment, five miles from my family and unable to get there; I would probably also hate to be stuck at my mom's apartment all my stuff five miles away and no way to get there except walking. Mom's apartment would probably be a somewhat better bet for surviving an apocalypse that struck in the middle of the winter, though. 

 

Anyway. Station Eleven was beautifully written, thought-provoking, and overall a pleasantly grim read. I liked it quite a lot.