I read Station Eleven in three days, and over the course of those three days I was entirely engrossed in this book’s story, in this book’s world. On the day I finished it, I read while eating my breakfast, closed my office door at lunchtime to read while eating lunch, and was so caught up in it on the subway ride home that it was a little surprising when we got to my stop. It’s literary post-apocalyptic fiction, which is not a thing I necessarily expected to like, but it’s really satisfying, with a structure that weaves together characters and subplots. It requires a suspension of disbelief—the way some characters’ paths cross and re-cross feels like a stretch—but it’s so good I really didn’t mind.
The book starts in Toronto, during a production of King Lear: an actor, Arthur Leander, has a heart attack onstage; an audience member, Jeevan Chaudhary, jumps up from the first row to give him CPR but can’t save him, and ends up comforting a child actor named Kirsten Raymonde who’s watched the whole thing happen. Meanwhile, that same night, the hospitals in Toronto start filling up: an aggressive new strain of swine flu has entered the city on a flight from Moscow. The virus spreads, and civilization falls apart in the face of the pandemic: Jeevan, holed up in his brother’s apartment, makes a comment about how it’ll be when the power comes back, and his brother asks why he thinks it ever will.
Twenty years later, Kirsten is still an actor, moving around the area that used to be Michigan with the Traveling Symphony, an orchestra + Shakespearean troupe that performs music and plays in various scattered settlements of survivors. She carries some keepsakes from childhood with her, including a pair of comic books no one else has ever seen, both of which feature a protagonist named Dr. Eleven, who lives on a space station after Earth has been taken over by hostile aliens. (“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth,” Dr. Eleven thinks at one point, and the line resonates.) Meanwhile, a pair of Kirsten’s friends from the Traveling Symphony have temporarily settled in a town: they were having a baby, and the idea was that the Symphony would pick them up again at some point after the birth. But when the Symphony passes through town again, they hear that the couple and their baby have left; the town is being run by a man calling himself the prophet and his followers, and the rest of the townspeople seem frightened: things are not good or normal in this town.
The story progresses, then, alternating between Kirsten and the Symphony’s travels/their attempt to reunite with their friends (who, they’ve heard, might have headed for a settlement at a nearby airport) and their further run-ins with the prophet and other bits of narrative: flashbacks to pre-pandemic moments in Arthur Leander’s life (including letters from him to a friend that were published as an unauthorized biography); pre-pandemic moments from the lives of other characters connected to Arthur, including his first wife, Miranda; various events from about five years before the main Kirsten/Symphony narrative, including an interview between Kirsten and a small-town librarian who’s started up his own newspaper; flashes of the earlier post-pandemic world, including the early days of the settlement at the airport. I like how the story is constructed, and I like the lyricism of Mandel’s prose when she’s writing about the world that was lost, or about the unexpected moments of beauty in the new world: the stars more visible without city lights, the idea of a traveling theatre troupe/orchestra that has a quote from Star Trek (“Because survival is insufficient”) painted on its caravan.
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