Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
When it comes to post-apocalyptic fiction, many books focus on the catastrophe and the struggle to survive afterwards. Station Eleven is more of a mainstream literary fiction novel. The apocalyptic events are largely skipped over in favor of a more traditional character-driven story. The novel straddles the catastrophe telling the story of a set of characters from before and after. While parts of the novel are compelling the different stories don’t connect well with one another.
The novel is non-chronological and follows six characters, making for a complicated plot. It follows the lives of five characters from years before the disaster to two decades afterward. Over 99% of humanity is killed in a horrific swine flu pandemic. Linking the characters together is a self-absorbed actor named Arthur Leander. The other characters include Arthur’s ex-wife, one of his friends, a child actor, and the EMT that tried to help him as he suffered a heart attack. As they look back on the tragic events in the world, they find their connection to Arthur important.
The prose is really strong, pulling you in at first. While the character stories are interesting individually, they get lost in the constant jumps between perspectives and times. The exact nature and strength of the Arthur connection is very uneven and often not compelling. For example, the EMT never speaks a word to Arthur, seeing him only once on stage. Although he tried to save his life, the attempted rescue has no connection to the pandemic and a limited one to the other characters.
Arthur is also a pretty bad choice for the hub of a character network. He is a former big time celebrity who falls from stardom to become a small-time Shakespeare theater player. There is an odd mixture of guilt and self-pity for a man who didn’t really care for anyone other than himself, even bashing some for not doing anything for him. He feels a little guilty because he thinks his fame us undeserved and complains of the inconveniences of being a famous celebrity. His constant infidelities, which led to two divorces, don’t bother him in the least.
The other link between the characters is a graphic novel series called Station Eleven. Arthur’s first wife Miranda made it and gave two copies to him just before his heart attack. They find their way into the hands of the other characters and seem to stick in their consciousness. The graphic novels are about a space station that flees the Solar System after Earth dies. There are a small group of dissidents who desire to return to Earth although nothing is there.
Mandel draws a lot of attention to the graphic novel but its significance is unclear. Mandel also wants to be clear that its not a comic strip but a graphic novel. It is unclear why the distinction is important.
The inexplicable fixation on Arthur and the graphic novel make this Cloud Atlas style novel surprisingly dull at times given the subject-matter. Why would these people spend more time thinking about Arthur than say their lost relatives or perhaps the trauma they’ve endured? Either the connection is too subtle for me or just wasn’t enough to make me feel this was one unified story.
Many aspects of a typical post-apocalyptic novel are absent. There is very little discussion of the disease or the apocalyptic events. Only one character experiences or witnesses the disease. Everyone else somehow manages to avoid it, despite it killing billions of people around them. The rebuilding phase is largely skipped. All of the post-apocalyptic sections cover the characters over a decade after the pandemic, after they’ve gained a new set of survival skills and adapted to the new world. Finally, the characters don’t seem to experience much emotional pain. It is all so polite, with events being accepted without much deep feeling.
The emotional angst is reserved for the drama that occurs before the apocalypse. This odd reversal of the post-apocalyptic trope makes for some strange moments. Mandel spends more time on what one could call “first world” problems rather than survival problems. Combined with the multitude of third person point of views and jumping from different points in time, the book doesn’t really build up to much of a climax.
The book is well-written from a stylistic standpoint and has some really good moments. Mandel is a talented writer but the novel as a whole isn’t well-executed. Taken as a post-apocalyptic novel, it ignores the most compelling aspects of the subgenre. If you approach it as more of a traditional literary fiction novel, it is short on emotional conflict. If there was some other subtle theme present I did not pick up on it. A few reviews mention references to King Lear but I don’t see much of a connection. The closest analogue I have to Station Eleven is Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. If you loved Cloud Atlas, you might like this one. Otherwise I don’t recommend this for regular science fiction readers.
3 Stars
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