Station Eleven

SO much better than the series. ( )

Loved it. Happy to get away from the gun fantasies of the mid-twentieth century action novels for something fresh. ( )

I really enjoyed this although I think I need to now re-read it to piece together some of the connections established. ( )

Mandel's luminous 2014 novel tells the story of a gigantic catastrophe through connections - material, emotional, temporal, between the living and the dead.

The connections radiate outward from one night in Toronto, where Arthur Leander, a 51 year old actor, has a fatal heart attack onstage while he plays King Lear. Present, among others, is Kirsten Raymonde, an 8 year old child actor. That same night, the Georgia Flu arrives in Toronto. Within weeks, over 99% of the human species will die.

Looking backward from Arthur's death, we visit his personal history and the people of his life - friends, associates, three ex-wives. Looking forward, twenty years afterward, Kirsten belongs to The Traveling Symphony, a band of musicians and actors who make their living visiting the small, remaining settlements around the Great Lakes, performing music and plays - especially Shakespeare. The world has changed: gone are easy travel, reliable medicine, fast communications. Yet people still love music and theater. The small, ordinary tales of Arthur and Kirsten - his divorces, his career, her rocky relationship with the actor playing Oberon to her Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream - echo the great universe of human connection cut short by the pandemic. Connections are also made via odd material items - a comic book, a paperweight, cell phones - mementos of the old world and touchstones for their possessors.

Mandel's future convinces - that tattoos will be dangerous in a world without antibiotics, for example. At one point the Symphony passes through a town run by a religious cult; experienced in this new world, they see the risk and get out of town immediately after their performance. I do question whether a flu that brings illness in hours and death in days could spread everywhere - shouldn't it kill its early victims too quickly to spread well? And shouldn't there be enough solar panels and hydropower around that the post-apocalyptic world will have at least some electricity? Using these tropes simplifies the story, perhaps in a way that enhances its impact. Also though, Mandel employs the trope of the world enduring years of bloody anarchy after the fall. Kirsten has a facial scar from the first year, whose cause she cannot remember; everyone has trauma from that time and danger still looms in Year Twenty. But Rebecca Solnit has argued that communities of mutual support often form in disasters. Might that angle not have been better, in a book otherwise about people coming together?

Because Mandel's connections do hold. In the midst of our current pandemic, this apocalypse is a refreshing vision of hope. ( )

A must read! ( )