Review: Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

I should mention first of all that I bought Station Eleven after reading a review on one of my favourite blogs: https://misfortuneofknowing.wordpress.com/

Amazon link

It starts obliquely.  Nothing much happening apart from a middle-aged actor going through multiple mid-life crises and messing up his lines, before collapsing on stage.  Who would have guessed that it would turn out to be an end-of-the-world story? 

I would have said that I didn’t like post-apocalyptic as a genre.  But there is something more to Station Eleven than the gruesome demise of the human race, and I was delighted that Mandel didn’t go in for vicarious deathly detail.  Instead, she follows the survival of diverse groups of people who have made it through the epidemic and created various kinds of communities.  Some are more appealing than others.  All are leftfield and (in my opinion) perhaps a little esoteric. 

What really drew me in were Mandel’s observations.  A world without electricity, juxtaposed with the desire to flick a switch, just to bring back the memory of what it felt like to flood a room with light.  An obsession with travel and telecommunications -  in the new world there are children who have grown up not knowing about the miracle of the Internet, who gasp at the implausibility of rockets to the moon. 

And, there is ‘Station Eleven’ – Dr. Eleven and his psychedelic comic book story of a spaceship drifting in a parallel universe, its inspirational close-ups and bubble language building from the past and influencing the future in the most unpredictable of ways.  Its slogan and epitaph ‘survival is insufficient’ (borrowed from an episode of Startreck).

Like any good story, there are characters you care about.  Their hopes and aspirations cruelly shattered by the epidemic.  Mandel creates a retrospective poignancy with remembered lives set against a bleak future.  Many questions are raised about what it is that should be kept from the past and shared with the children growing up in the future.  The intimation that there will be a future is deeply consoling.

One of the most interesting reads so far this year.