Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.
This is the most undramatic post-apocalyptic/contagion novel I've read. It's very matter-of-fact in its doom. Instead on focusing on the pandemic that wipes out most of humanity, it focuses on the people who survive and try to live in the aftermath, spanning decades. While it's undramatic in tone, it also puts into perspective how awful it would be to have to endure an epidemic and survive instead of live (there is a massive difference). Oddly, or not oddly, enough, the work of Shakespeare survives the pandemic, when so many other common, day-to-day things die out with the pandemic. This book is brilliant.
Station Eleven follows multiple characters throughout the years that this book spans. In doing so, we get perspective from and about the characters. The event that this book starts with doesn't really have to do with the rest of the plot as a whole (besides degrees of separation), you see just how lucky Arthur Leander was to have died of a heart attack given what is about to happen. We see later on how long the other cast members last in the pandemic. We see through different time jumps, what happens to each character at different points through (and before) the decades-long event. How interesting it is that the concept of time is one of the first things to go. Oh, sure, they're still keeping time, but not nearly in the same way that it was kept pre-flu epidemic.
The writing style in this book, as I have mentioned, is undramatic. While there are dire circumstances, and St. John Mandel notes the direness of the circumstances, it's not sensationalized like other survivalist and speculative fiction novels are. This is a book about people and how people live and survive in the hardest of conditions. While it's undramatic in writing style, it is never bored or boring. Quite the opposite; the undrama in the tone gives the book an extra emphasis on character and how civilization may come to its end as we know it. It's kind of like if Cormac McCarthy's The Road (one of my all-time favourites) had a younger sibling that was less grim.
I was also really jazzed to see that this book takes place mostly in Toronto. I knew where everything was that she described in this novel. That, combined with the easy writing style, it was easy to imagine where things were going down. It's always cool to see things happening in your home province.
I loved this book so much. I inhale-read it as fast as I could; I didn't want to put it down. It gives an intriguing look into what would happen after an epidemic. I like contagion novels, but I had never read one quite like this, where the contagion is just the McGuffin, and the main focal point is on the survivors. Well-written with well-rounded characters and a very interesting concept, Station Eleven shows the resilience of people in dire circumstances and paints a very realistic portrait of what would happen if civilization collapsed following a global epidemic. Station Eleven for sure gets 5/5 - I highly recommend it to all.
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