Station Eleven: Discovering beauty through loss
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Book Review – Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
I recently read Station Eleven and despite the sizable marketing efforts and social media hype, I had very little knowledge of what it contained. To give a brief summary, twenty years after the Georgian Flu wipes out most of the world’s population, survivors have formed settlements. A group of actors and musicians band together to travel from one community to the next to perpetuate human culture by performing music and theater plays. This is their journey and the story that connects them.
One of the main characters carries two graphic novels about Dr. Eleven, a physicist who escaped to ‘Station Eleven’ after an alien race took over Earth. Readers learn that ‘Station Eleven’ is a ship that is perpetually traveling through space away from the “sweetness of life on Earth”. These graphic novels serve as a parable of events in the story and they end up playing an important part in how all the characters are connected. Nathan Burton, responsible for the beautiful cover of the UK edition, designed a couple of pages of the graphic novel as a bonus.
The big difference from other post-apocalyptic novels is that Station Eleven doesn’t focus on violence and the devolving of humankind into a savage state. Instead, St. John Mandel, chooses to meditate on humanism and the magnificence of the everyday miracles that happen in contemporary life without us appreciating them.
Only when everything goes away, we realize the beauty of the things we took for granted.
That’s not to say that there’s no evil in the world St. John Mandel creates. There is, as in many novels and films of its kind, a religious cult involved, with a leader – aptly called The Prophet – that inflicts trials and tribulations on its members. But unlike many other outings, Station Eleven doesn’t rely its entire plot on the conflict between the good group and the evil cult.
Even though the parts of the novel devoted to that particular situation do evoke a lot of dread, and lead to some characters facing a troubled journey from one community to another (yes, a clear nod to Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece The Road), it’s only a small component of the storyline. Instead, the plot focuses on connections between people and how the characters are linked to each other despite being scattered around the world. How they go through life unaware of these connections and how one person’s actions affects the life of others in a sort of ripple effect. This approach turns into one of the novel’s greater accomplishments because by moving back-and-forth in time, it manages to tie those apparently random and independent incidents to create a magnificently interlinked story.
Thanks for the British Fantasy Awards shortlist congrats! Was surprised to learn I’d written a horror novel,but it’s not like I’m objective.
— Emily St. J. Mandel (@EmilyMandel) July 21, 2015
The novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in May of 2015 and much to the author’s surprise has now been nominated for the British Fantasy Award in the Best Horror Novel category. In reality, it isn’t that perplexing at all, considering that the whole narrative touches on some of humanity’s most basic fears, including extinction and separation (for more about that, you can read Why Horror Terrifies Us).
In summary, I was captivated and touched the whole way through. Love it when something lives up to the hype.
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
HarperCollins Canada
