Oh, this is a very good book. Most book reviews tend to tell you a lot of details about the story. I have to admit I like these reviews because they sometimes saves me from reading the book, though this is usually for non-fiction and biographies. This is not that kind of review. I will sketch out the story but you need to read this book.
Author Ann Patchett (I haven’t read much of her work but it she is on my list) is now my go-to person for book recommendations. In a recent interview she recommended the novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, as one of her favorite new books. After finishing the book in less than a week I have to agree. This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It’s one of those books where when I am on my ten-minute bus ride into the city I am hoping for a little traffic so I can read longer.
Station Eleven is a new spin on a story that been told many times. Some apocalyptical event occurs wiping out most of the world’s population along with our electricity-based infrastructure (planes, cars, cell phones, PCs…). Post event we follow groups of survivors as they make their way in this new world. “The Stand” by Stephen King and “The Passage” by Justin Cronin (which is referenced in this book and is the scariest of all them) have told similar stories, as have movies like the new “Planet of the Apes” series and the recently cancelled television show “Revolution”.
In Station Eleven the event is a super-flu that has been transported from Russia to Toronto on plane full of infected tourists. From there it is a matter of weeks until the end of civilization (One in 300 survive). On the same night in Toronto, during a snowstorm, an aging actor playing the lead in King Lear is stricken during the performance and dies on stage. It is the multiple entanglements that many of the characters have with the actor, Arthur Leander, that propel the story forward. Among them is the man who leaps onto the stage from the audience to try and save Arthur, the eight-year-old actress who is watching this from the wings, his best friend, two of his ex-wives and his young son.
After these opening scenes in Toronto, Station Eleven then leaps to 20 years after the flu. In the new world we follow The Traveling Symphony, a group of surviving musicians and actors who travel around the Great Lakes region to new settlements, performing Shakespeare. This is juxtaposed with the back-story of Arthur Leander and those whose lives he has intersected with in the years leading up to the super flu.
The title comes from a series of graphic novels written, but never published, by one of the main characters. The subject of the graphic novel becomes a metaphor for the adventures of the characters wandering in the post flu world. The characters are well drawn and Mandel makes you care about them. The back-stories are rich. The story is hopeful, not grim.
It all fits together seamlessly creating a book that is hard to put down.