Dystopic. Hopeful. Alive. Three words that come to mind when I sit down to write this review. When a flu pandemic decimates a majority of the world’s population, only a few survive. They survive in bands, communities or on their own, travelling through an unfamiliar world with no internet, no telephones, no vehicles, and most importantly no electricity. Every convenience we enjoy today, grocery stores, pharmacies, banks, are no longer active.
Parallels run through this story set in the Great Lakes area of North America. In the opening, Arthur Leander, a famed Shakespearean actor playing King Lear, dies of a heart attack on stage in mid sentence. Jeevan Chaudhary, an ordinary man training to be a Paramedic, rushes to try to save his life. This pivotal moment, with characters that will be followed throughout the story, is minimized by the massive pandemic that collapses civilization as we know it. Also on stage at the time of Leander’s death, is an eight year old actress, Kirsten Raymonde, who grows through Year Twenty in the post-apocalyptic time, her own surviving family an older brother, learns by experience. A brother who dies, leaving her on her own. She carries with her two graphic novels, never published, written by Arthur’s first wife, Miranda. The story is of an alternate life on earth and those people sketched are from her personal life.
Kristan joins a roving and disjointed Symphony. They perform Shakespearian plays in the tiny communities that sparsely dot the land. Their motto, painted on the side of their horse drawn vehicle, is a quotation from a Star Trek episode: Survival is insufficient. One very closed community is led by ‘the prophet’, a very unpleasant character who is introduced near the beginning of the story, but the reader does not know where he has really come from until towards the end. Another character, Clark, although not a specifically a leader, establishes a ‘Museum of Civilization’ in the community that grew up within an airport. In the early days of community, a young girl frantically searches for someone who has Effexor, the antidepressant prescribed to her. This brought me up short as I have my own medications to take daily to live life - and not just survive.
Acceptance of this dramatically changed life comes with great difficulty to everyone. Emily St. John Mandel takes all of her characters through learning, not only to survive, but to live and love in the moments that followed. She showed us that hope was in babies born, in the automatic building of community, and in the belief of the travellers that art and music must and will continue. Kristen, her friends and fellow travellers walk carefully through the destruction, see beauty of nature growing up over houses, rusted cars and buildings. See the simple beauty of deer in this new world, yet always alert for dangers from other ‘feral’ survivors or their surroundings. Their survival becomes anything but insufficient.
“Survival is insufficient.”
~ StarTrek Voyager, Season Six, Episode Two
Title: Station Eleven
Author: Emily St.John Mandel
Publisher: Harper Avenue, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Copyright @ 2014
Format: Soft cover
ISBN: 978-1-44343-486-7
Type: Science Fiction
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