A gripping post-apocalyptic tale, “Station Eleven” skillfully captures the collapse and aftermath of “the Georgia flu.”
Author Emily St. John Mandel adds a welcome wrinkle, though, in introducing the Traveling Symphony into the world after. She places us among a troupe of actors and musicians who loop around Michigan’s mitten, entertaining the small communities that remain with Shakespeare and symphonies while dodging cults and creeps trying to Mad Max their well through the End Times.
By placing us with the Symphony, and using flashbacks to conjure the connected lives of an actor, an artist, a paparazzo and other creative types, St. John Mandel conjures something more literary than your standard post-disaster fare. As the Traveling Symphony’s motto (lifted from Star Trek) reminds us, “survival is insufficient.”
Her characters are sensitive, vulnerable, and often flawed. She does a good job showing us how their heartbreaks and imperfections made them the people they now are, even as the flu, with its 99% mortality rate, made the world we see in these pages.
The interconnections between the characters are deftly drawn, but I did find my disbelief strained as the different threads overlapped at the book’s conclusion. St. John Mandel also cheats a little to undermine the darker ending the book seemed to be building toward. Still, “Station Eleven” was an exciting, engaging read.
Quotes
“This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. He had done some things he wasn’t proud of. If Miranda was so unhappy in Hollywood, why hadn’t he just taken her away from there? It wouldn’t have been difficult. The way he’d dropped Miranda for Elizabeth and Elizabeth for Lydia and let Lydia slip away to someone else. The way he’d let Tyler be taken to the other side of the world. The way he’d spent his entire life chasing after something, money or frame or immortality or all of the above. He didn’t really even know his only brother. How many friendships had he neglected until they’d faded out? On the first night of previews, he’d barely made it off the stage. On the second night, he’d arrived on the platform with a strategy. He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.”