I was drawn to Station Eleven
Station Eleven is dystopian fiction. The story starts pre-end of civilization as we know it due to a pandemic, but flashes back and forth between pre- and post-pandemic. It is told through the eyes of five different characters that all have a connection to a famous Hollywood actor named Arthur Leander.
I’ve read quite a few dystopian novels, and though some of the characteristics of the story are similar in nature to apocalyptic literature, Station Eleven as a whole felt fresh and was an interesting story. I think one of the reasons is because the story was more character than plot driven.
Each of the characters in Station Eleven has an interesting way in which their individual lives connect to the others characters. At first I was a bit squeamish with the religious fanaticism that is present in Station Eleven and thought it was a somewhat cliché storyline, but I didn’t mind how it eventually resolved.
One thing that I think Emily St. John Mandel did very well how she addresses post-apocalyptic life. Many dystopian novels are about the collapse of society itself, or paint a dismal picture of the aftermath, but Mandel’s story is hopeful. One group of peoples in the book have a phrase from Star Trek as their motto: “Because survival is insufficient.” There is a sense that there is more to life than just surviving and it exists in each of the character’s lives. The story certainly has the dismal weaved into it, but all throughout, and not just at the end, is a sense of purpose, community, and pressing forward.
I’m somewhere between a three and four stars for this book, probably because I had heard so many great things about it that I had high expectations that were somewhat disappointed. I listened to the audio version of it and the reader couldn’t hack a British accent to save her life, which seems like an important skill to have when reading a British character (think Kevin Costner, Robin Hood). It distracted a bit from the story.
[amazon asin=0385353308&template=iframe image]
Station Eleven
Science fiction
Knopf
September 9, 2014
352
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production ofKing Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.
Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan, and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.
Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
I started reading this over the weekend. Wowsers–one minute I was pinching myself to remember that the Georgia flu was NOT real and that I didn’t need to blitz the grocery stores for supplies, and the next I was evaluating what items might still work after gasoline ran out…