Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
I'm a sucker for post-apocalyptic novels, but especially when they are creative and thought provoking. Station Eleven was just that and Emily St. John Mandel wrote a more subtle darkness in this post-apocalyptic world that captivated me.
With her descriptions of the landscapes and lives of each character in pre and post-apocalyptic worlds, an intense loneliness clearly comes through. Not only is there significant stress on the characters after the flu wipes out the world as we know it, there is also significant duress on the characters before. I loved that the loneliness occurred in both times as it showed that happiness has to come from more than technology and money.
I also appreciated that Mandel writes about various survivors and eventually ties them altogether. It’s a wonderful way to see how an apocalypse can effect people in such different ways. Some of us may break and others turn to someone to lead us and find direction. Others find the strength they never knew they had. It was also intriguing to see how the lives intersected in both the pre and post-apocalyptic times because you were able to see how they reacted to similar situations when their lives are so drastically different.
Mandel cleverly uses the phrase “Survival is insufficient” from Star Trek several times throughout the novel. Because to be truly alive, people need to make choices of what it means to be human. Even in darkness, humans can create such amazing things. A Traveling Symphony performing Shakespeare’s plays to remind people of the beauty of the past, not just the tragedy. And maybe, even when everything seems hopeless, people can recreate all that was lost and failed once before.
I do have to warn other readers that it is not necessarily suspenseful in that it doesn't include a lot of fast-paced action. Rather, it’s suspenseful in the insights to different characters and what it means to be human and create civilization. I enjoyed the uniqueness of this type of suspense within a post-apocalyptic novel, but I understand it may not work for everyone.
Synopsis: One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.
Sometimes terrifying, sometimes tender, 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.