Station Eleven: A Novel (National Book Award Finalist)

by Emily St. John Mandel

This Anniversary Edition of Station Eleven, a finalist for the National Book Award and named a Best Book of the Twenty-First Century by the New York Times, celebrates ten years of this now iconic novel with a new color illustration and a guide to “The Mandelverse”

An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days following civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the spellbinding story of a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. 

It is fifteen years after a flu pandemic wiped out most of the world's population. Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony, a small troupe moving over the gutted landscape, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in the outpost of St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave. Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the disaster brought everyone here, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty, telling a story about the relationships that sustain us.

• ISBN10: 0804172447
• ISBN13: 9780804172448
• Publish Date: 2 June 2015 (first published 9 September 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 352
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780804172448

Reviews

[mubble]

"If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?"

I enjoyed this book for its gradual pacing and fascinating setting. Emily St. John Mandel uses beautiful, evocative imagery and the story jumps back and forth through time to make connections between characters and explore repeating ideas about loss, memory, and happenstance.

Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic story that doesn't dwell excessively on the how and why of the apocalypse. The attention is focused mainly on a network of highly coincidental character relationships surrounding the actor Arthur Leander and the fictional graphic novel Station Eleven. Each character finds their own way to cope with loss - of loved ones and of their old world.

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

[Kim Deister]

Because of COVID, reading Station Eleven now, as opposed to when it was first published in 2014, probably created a very different reading experience. It’s impossible to read without drawing parallels between the world of the book and the world we live in right now. In Station Eleven, the Georgia Virus has caused the total collapse of human civilization as we know it, an extreme version of what we are now facing. The pandemic we are living through right now made the story of the book that much more imaginable.

The book opens just hours before the virus begins to spread across the world. Arthur, an actor, collapses during a production of King Lear. Much of the story takes place in the present, some fifteen years after the virus changed the world. The rest of it is told through flashbacks to the early days of the pandemic and even earlier, through the eyes of Arthur and four others who are connected to him, and to each other in bizarre twists of fate. The back and forth truly underlines just how much the world has changed in the aftermath of the virus. Now the world bears little resemblance to the “civilized” environment of days gone by. Instead, it’s a world that has been decimated, and those that are left have formed into scattered communities. The Traveling Symphony have spent years as nomads, going from community to community around the Great Lakes in an effort to keep the idea of art alive.

The writing is very good, the language descriptive. The postapocalyptic world, at times, is reminiscent of the bleakness of Atlanta in The Walking Dead. The highway with its miles of eternal gridlock, the signs of the earth taking back the abandoned wreckage of a world that is no more. But the tone is much quieter without the chaos of that postapocalyptic event.

The book kept me turning the pages. There were moments when I just couldn’t put it down. But I still have rather complicated feelings about it. The book, in the beginning, was very focused on Jeevan. Yet there was comparatively little about him throughout the rest of the book. There was a bit near the end that felt more like a “ticking of the box” to wrap up his story than any real conclusion to it. And the prophet… There was nothing about how he came to be as he was, and I feel like that was an opportunity missed. I think it was something that really needed to be explored. There was also a section that had a very different vibe than the rest of the book, a bit of the supernatural, which was jarring. It didn’t seem to fit. Later, I ran across the author answering a question about it on Goodreads. Her answer… she really just wanted to write a ghost story. So I feel justified in feeling like it was out of place.

And the most complicated feeling… I felt like there was little in the way of character arcs for any of them. Generally, I detest a novel without a good character arc. (I’m looking at you, The Catcher in the Rye.) But somehow, it didn’t matter with this book. I enjoyed it anyway!!

I just finished it and not sure what to say. I had heard so many people rave about this book that unfortunately it may have set my expectations too high. That and reading a book about life after a virus wipes out most of the population during a real life pandemic is interesting and a little unsettling. It sure makes me think about how this could be possible and I appreciate all the comforts we have right now. I found it to be well written and the story was creative. I did like how the story jumps back and forth in time, slowly revealing the interconnections between the characters. It was a solid book that I'd give 3.5 stars.

[HekArtemis]

This was difficult to read, I think it always would be a little difficult to read as it gets quite real with how it presents a viral apocalypse - before, during, and after. But reading it right now made it that much more difficult. I do not suggest reading it right now. After this is all over? sure, go for it - but not right now (early-mid 2020, or is this Year 0?). Not unless you know for sure that you can deal with it.

I particularly enjoyed the part where one of our characters is fantasising about finally being rescued and he imagines that they will congratulate him on stocking up on 7 trolleys worth of groceries in a single evening.... including toilet paper and hand sanitiser. I am sure this would have been a nothing scene before 2020, but reading it while some of the shop shelves are still empty and we are only just now getting toilet paper regularly available again really made me laugh.

I was worried for a bit that there would be a lot of focus on the religious fanatic - there are a few things I struggle with reading, and religious fanaticism is right near the top. It's the Pagan in me I think, all religious fanaticism ends with me being burned at the stake, it is legitimately real world terrifying to me, so I struggle to read about it. Thankfully it wasn't a huge focus - despite being a major part of the story, the actual fanatic isn't really in the story all that much. Thank goodness.

This is not a horror story or anything, but it is kind of scary because it is quite realistic about certain things. And while the majority of the story is full of endings and loss, it is also full of hope - "survival is not enough" being the borrowed motto of our main troupe. And the ending is very hopeful in my opinion.

[pamela]

Sataion Eleven was a book that thrived on the strength of its prose. The plot isn't particularly gripping, but Emily St. John Mandel's writing is lyrical and evocative enough for it not to matter too much.

The novel is more character than plot-driven, and there is a diverse cast of people with different motivations, lives, and experiences. Watching the way their separate experiences came together was interesting. The plot wove together in twists and turns that were fun to follow and try and decipher.

I would have preferred if Sataion Eleven had focused more on the post-pandemic present, rather than the past. The character of Arthur Leander, the lynchpin of the story was, unfortunately, one of the least interesting and unlikeable characters in the whole novel.

What I loved about Sataion Eleven, however, was its thought-provoking take on modern life. It raises questions regarding the pointlessness of celebrity, the shallowness of the corporate grind, and the fundamental importance of the arts in who we are as a civilization. It also felt like a call to be more present in our own existence - to really sit back and take stock of what's important.

Sataion Eleven wasn't a perfect novel. There were moments in its execution that I felt it could have had more development, or come to a more satisfying conclusion. But it was a nice read, despite its' serious subject matter, and was intellectual without being pretentious. It was a refreshing take on an often overdone dystopian genre.

[maggiefan]

This book is so beautiful and special.

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

Station Eleven talks about life before and after an influenza epidemic that wipes out 99.9% of the human race. It's a fast-acting agent, and most of humanity is dead within a week. We follow five different characters who all had a common thread - knowing (or being) actor Arthur Leander - and find out what happened to them before, after, and during the outbreak.

I really enjoyed the dystopian world this is set in. Most dystopias go for a post-war fallout, but Station Eleven focuses on a before, during, and after of an influenza epidemic. Emily St. John Mandel's writing style is pretty, but not overly flowery. It's also written in multiple POVs, which is my favorite! Of course, the problem with multiple POVs is that when you get particularly attached to a character, it takes forever to get back to that POV.

There are definite flaws. For one - the pacing lags enough that the plot feels pretty disconnected and the story becomes more of a slice of life than a linear plot. Which is perfectly fine, but generally speaking, it's not my cup of tea. So while I did generally enjoy the characters and I LOVED the world-building, the scattered pot and pacing are what kept it from being a five star read.

[clementine]

I've read a lot of modern dystopian/post-apoc fiction (mostly of the YA variety, granted), and at this point it's hard to impress me since so much of it relies on the same tropes. Yes, the idea of a technology-stripped wasteland has been done before, but this take was still fresh. Setting the majority of the novel twenty years after the downfall of humanity was perfect, as it allowed Mandel to explore the nostalgia older adults had for the past and also the incomprehensibility of the old world to the younger generation. At first I thought the focus on a movie star in a novel about a plague-destroyed world was incongruous, but it totally worked. The juxtaposition between the opulence of Arthur's life and the desolate years after his death was fascinating, but it was more than that - there was a symmetry in the isolation of fame and of the apocalypse. Beautiful, lush writing, too.

[sarahjay]

I stand in front of the mirror. I stare. I - she - someone - stares back.

I see her mouth move. My mouth? "I did not like it," she whispers.

"What do you mean?" I cannot tell if I hear myself aloud, or if the words stay inside my head. "Did not like what?"

"I did not like Station Eleven." 

I gasp - or try to. But I cannot breathe. How can this be? This book... it's so beloved, so praised. "Darkly glittering," the dust jacket says. The beautiful, beautiful dust jacket. The cover is so pretty. Everyone says so.

I have stared in the mirror before, but this... this deep betrayal is new. 

I see a wide void open up behind me. No - behind her. It's darkly glittering. My reflection begins to scream, but I cannot hear her. She is swallowed up, leaving me alone. Truly alone.

Here I am to talk shit about your fave. 

This book was next in line in my dystopian list. It had been sitting on my shelf for ages. I thought, I can't possibly call myself a fan of female-authored dystopian lit without having read Station Eleven. So, here we are. I have read it. I finished it a couple of hours ago, and I am already forgetting the names of every single character. Fly away, forgettable characters. Fly away and be free.

I saw a lot of positive reviews of people saying some variation of "this wasn't what I was expecting, but I loved it!" This book was not what I was expecting, and I hated it. I expected something beautifully written (all right, fair enough for the most part, that aspect was fine) about the end of the world. What I got was a book about... like... theatre people. And how it's real hard being a celebrity, and it's also real hard to be a paparazzo. And also, by the way, a plague killed like 99% of the population, everyone misses cell phones and there's a prophet guy in this one town.

I mean, I can understand why people like it... I think. But if you give me a novel that is advertised as a dystopian (i.e., the world has dramatically changed in some terrifyingly irreversible way and now everyone left has to adapt to survive) but then spends half the story on this guy named Arthur (that's his name, right?) who was from this really small island that no one's ever heard of, who really wants to be an actor, and then he meets this much younger woman, and they get married, but then he falls in love with someone else and has an affair, and then that happens two more times in exactly the same kind of way, and then expect me to care about him whatsoever, you have given me the wrong type of book. "It's hard to be famous," he whines to the entertainment journalist who used to be the paparazzo. "I'm so tired." Okay. Me too, Adam. I read this book about you and now I'm also tired.

Look, the thing is, I have no patience for stories that are basically like "man, it's just, art is so important, you know?" Which I think... maybe that's what this book was trying to say? I guess? It's definitely in there. I'm still trying to figure out what was important to learn from the history of Aaron's ex-wives and how he wanted to be famous and successful, then hated it once he was famous and successful, then he died, and then a plague killed almost everyone. Is the point of this book that life is pointless? Except for like, the art, maaaan. Ashton gets it. Here's yet another chapter about him.

I'm giving this book two stars solely because of two things: 

1. The Traveling Symphony's motto was "Because survival is insufficient," which is a quote from Star Trek: Voyager, a show I love, and 
2. There's this one scene right in the beginning where the ex-paparazzi guy hears rumors about the flu epidemic and goes shopping, and he fills up seven shopping carts and walks them to his brother's condo or wherever he lives, and he brings them up to his room and the brother, whose name is Frank, answers the door and is like "I see you went shopping." This made me laugh.

I feel like I should be apologizing, because everyone adores this book. Maybe I shouldn't have read it right after reading The Power, a book I'm still obsessing over. Maybe I shouldn't have been watching The Handmaid's Tale while taking breaks from this book. Or maybe it should just have been advertised correctly, which is to say: it's mainly a book about a famous guy who dies during a performance of King Lear and also, sometimes, it's about these other people who knew him in different ways having lives that intertwine in various, non-interesting ways, none of whom you spend enough time with to begin to care about them. And also a plague. 

Anyway, I'm not apologizing. I think what I think. This isn't really a dystopian to me. It has dystopian elements, sure. But to me, a good dystopian novel says something that matters. And this book didn't say anything revolutionary to me, nothing that countless other navel-gazing books about the importance of art and literature and shit haven't already said. I didn't like it. I wanted to, and I didn't.

Void, swallow me up now.

[gmcgregor]

In Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, the world is devastated, like 99%-of-the-population-gone devastated, by a mutated flu that gets into the global transportation system. In Toronto, the events kick off when an actor, Arthur Leander, collapses while playing the title role in a production of King Lear. An EMT-in-training, Jeevan, leaps onto stage to try to help, while a young actress, Kirsten, playing a child version of one of the daughters watches it play out in front of her. Within weeks, the world as we know it has ceased to exist. No more internet. Shit, no more electricity. Some people are immune and survive, but are they the lucky ones?

The primary thread of the story follows Kirsten fifteen years later, as she and the other actors and musicians who make up The Travelling Symphony journey through coastal southwest Michigan. Small communities have sprung up along the shores of the Great Lakes, and the ragtag crew that makes up the Symphony continually loop around them, performing, taking their inspiration from a line from Star Trek: "survival is insufficient". The group is excited to return to one particular town, where one of their members left them to settle down, but when they arrive they find their friend gone and things much changed. The town is now controlled by a cult leader known as The Prophet. When a stowaway pops up after the troupe has fled, trouble follows.

There are a lot of time jumps in this book. So much so that it seems almost unfair to call it entirely a post-apocalyptic novel, since a decent chunk of the narrative actually takes place before the flu hits. It goes from Kirsten in her present, to Arthur in his early years, to an interview taking place after the flu but before the principal timeline, and so on and so forth. It sounds confusing, but the way that Mandel writes it it's actually pretty easy to follow. It's a tricky thing to pull off, a narrative that moves around in time as much as hers does, but Mandel is a talented writer and, for my money, makes the emotional impact even stronger by doing it.

This is a wonderful book, y'all. Not only does Mandel handle her narrative masterfully, she also draws characters that resonate. You care about them, even knowing that some of them are going to meet their end when the virus happens. It's not a book like The Road about despair and sorrow. It's a book about people, and the connections that are made and fractured between them. There are certainly dark moments, but the atmosphere she creates is overall one of poignancy and bittersweetness. I loved reading it and am planning on purchasing a hard copy (I read this on my Kindle) so I can have it on my bookshelves to re-read on paper. I recommend it to literally anyone who likes to read.