Station Eleven

 Station Eleven

By Emily St. John Mandel

I choose this one after reading, and very much enjoying, The Glass Hotel. This is the better known of
Mandel's books. It was a finalist for the National Book Award when it came out in 2014. 

The Glass Hotel was largely inspired by Bernie Madoff's well-publicized and far-reaching Ponzi scheme. I had assumed this book, in which a flu pandemic wipes out most of the earth's population, was also taken from headlines. I was, in fact, about to write that it seemed like one of the few books to meaningfully take on what might have happened in the wake of Covid-19. But in my brief research about the book, I learned that it came out well before the real-life pandemic. Which makes it eerily prescient.

The central scene in the book, to which the plot keeps returning, is a performance of King Lear in Toronto in which the actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, suffers a fatal heart attack. In retrospect, it is a symbol/metaphor for what is to come. The play itself is about the breakdown of society. Leander, the most famous actor of his time, perhaps represents a sort of king figure. After three marriages, he, like Lear, is beset by internal anguish and moral blindness, and his downfall foretells the crumbling of the world order. For on the night of Arthur's death, the Georgia Flu, so named because it originated in Russia and Georgia, is discovered to have traveled widely. It is a fast acting and fatal disease. Within days, most of the world's human population is dead. With them goes the hallmarks of modern society: electricity, cars, planes, phones. The world is plunged into the dark ages.

The book follows Arthur's circle in both the lead up to and aftermath of these events. One of the main characters, Kirsten, was a child actor in the production of Lear. Within a few years, she joins a troupe of actors and musicians, known as the Symphony, who travels the area between the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare. Another is Jeevan Chaudry, a paparazzi turned celebrity journalist turned EMT; on the night of Arthur's death, he jumps on stage in an attempt to resuscitate him. Clark is Arthur's best friend from his formative years in a Toronto acting school. The Prophet, known as Tyler in the pre-pandemic years, is Arthur's son, who takes to traveling the countryside with his own band, claiming to be the light and using it as a justification for taking whatever he wants from whomever he wants. And Miranda, who does not survive the flu, is Arthur's first wife -- and, perhaps most importantly, the author of the eponymous comic book from which the book takes its title.

The novel converges at an airport outside of a once-small city in Michigan. It was there that Clark was unceremoniously dropped off in the first days of the pandemic, and he and his fellow travelers use it as a base to build a small community. It is a safe place. In a former lounge, he creates a museum to human's past civilization. In it, he places cell phones, newspaper clippings, and the like. When Kirsten arrives, she adds to it a copy of Station Eleven before heading off with the acting troupe once more.

A key theme of the book, written as a tattoo on Kirsten's arm, is a quotation from a Star Trek episode: Survival is not sufficient. The book explored the meaning of art and its role in keeping people truly alive, even in the wake of immense destruction. At one point, there is a debate about whether to pass on pre-pandemic culture. Isn't it just upsetting to know of what once was? The book seems to indicate that it isn't, that it in fact sustains us. 

The book ends on an optimistic note. Somehow, in the land to the south of Clark's airport, a town has found the means to light electric lamps. How? What does it mean for humanity? Kirsten sets out to explore.

What a wonderful book. I tore my way through it. I would like to explore more of Mandel's work.