STATION ELEVEN by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

“What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.”

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

Disclaimer: This review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Station Eleven is a book that sat waiting for me to read it for a very long time. Now that I’ve finally done it, I’m both annoyed at myself for having put it off for this long, and also grateful that I did; I’ve been depriving myself of this exquisite reading experience for nearly two years, but I also think I read this book at the perfect time in my life. Station Eleven is about an apocalypse, a flu pandemic with a 99% mortality rate that wipes out almost all of humanity in less than a month. Following the collapse of civilization, the remaining dregs of the human race splinter off, but they also band together, forming diverse communities of wounded but resilient people determined to live, despite all signs pointing to life being pointless. Emily St. John Mandel (who belongs to a category of authors of whom I am enormously jealous, because they are super young and beautiful and have written more books in their short and beautiful lives than I have) is a phenomenally talented writer, and Station Eleven is a gorgeous conglomerate of her mastery of prose, her elegant, shimmering storytelling, and her precise command of character.

One of my favourite aspects of Station Eleven was Mandel’s idea of the things that would survive the end of life as we know it. When I first had this book recommended to me, the selling point really drove home how much of a goddamn English major I am: it’s about a travelling symphony orchestra that performs Shakespeare plays to the small towns and communities it encounters on its travels. Shakespeare and Vonnegut: pretty much two of the only old white dudes I care about. The reason I love Shakespeare is not because I have any particular love of his writing -- in fact, I’ve barely read any of it -- but because I admire the way his writing outlived him, the way his words continue to influence and inspire the world in which I live today. Said someone on a message board that I Google-searched to have a quote for this review, the reason we still love Shakespeare all these years after his time is because “there is a depth of thought and feeling, and a magnificent manipulation of the English language that transcends time”. A powerful chapter in Station Eleven starts as follows: what was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Almost everything was lost when the pandemic swept across the Earth, and almost everyone on Earth was killed, but what did survive? Shakespeare, for one thing, and the love of performing him, but also the fundamentally human instinct to reach out and touch the things that we find beautiful, the inherently human impulse to risk everything for art and humanity. I loved the idea that the arts were something humanity clung to for support in the wake of devastation. I loved the idea that when tragedy drove humanity apart, storytelling was something that was able to bring it back together. For me, Station Eleven wasn’t about surviving an apocalypse; it was about living in spite of one, and remembering what made us human before ‘humanity’ was almost completely redefined. For the characters in the novel, Shakespeare was just that.

On the flipside of the coin is the other thing I found incredibly poignant about Station Eleven: Mandel’s reflections on all the things humanity lost in the wake of the pandemic. I’ve read a lot of post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction, but I’ve never read anything that felt as accurate, and thus as raw, as this book, because I’ve never read a post-apocalyptic or a dystopian novel that reminded me that in a post-apocalyptic and/or dystopian world, there would be no more dentists. No more dental hygiene. There would also be no more air travel, no more electricity, no more Internet; no more orchard fruits unless someone made an effort to keep growing them, no more newspapers, no more tabloid magazines, “no more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite [...] No more countries, all borders unmanned. No more fire departments, no more police”. Mandel placed such eerie emphasis on the things that were lost, things that you don’t consider losing and that post-apocalyptic writers never write about, because we just take them so much for granted. As someone who is deathly afraid of ever having to get a filling, the possibility of the end of dentistry really chilled me to my core, but all jokes aside: Mandel’s realism and her attention to detail made the reading experience so much more immersive, and also a lot more haunting. I liked how this book made me stop and think about these things. I like how this book made me place myself into the context of the narrative, consider myself in the situation it presented. Post-apocalyptic fiction is easy to brush aside as just that -- fiction -- but it’s harder to do that when the author has painted such a compelling and deeply-imagined picture of what the world might look like after a complete societal collapse.

Thematically and tonally, I think Station Eleven was genuinely perfect. Writing this review, I found myself trying to replicate the solemn, dignified, yet hopeful mood, because this book gave me the same feeling that I get when I look up at the stars: the sense that I’m a small part of something much bigger and more important, but also the feeling that that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Station Eleven is one of those stories that leaves you feeling different about the world once you finish reading it. I felt the same way when I read The Book Thief and Room and All the Light We Cannot See; you feel kind of quiet afterwards, take stock of your life and your choices, feel grateful for the things that you have. Station Eleven in particular evoked this emotion, as it was about a world in which the things that I have and take for granted are no longer accessible, no longer exist. I say that I think I read Station Eleven at the perfect time in my life because there are times in life when you need to read books that reminds you that what you have is precious, remind you to count your blessings, remind you to tell the people you love that you love them. Station Eleven was one of those books. It made me quiet; it made me appreciate the things I love a little bit more. Sometimes, that’s all you can ask from a good book, and Station Eleven gave me all that and more.

IF YOU LIKED STATION ELEVEN, YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

• All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr [review]
• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
• Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman [review]
• It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini
• Room by Emma Donoghue [review]