Shortlisted for the 2014 National Book Awards Observer Thriller of the Month DAY ONE The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. WEEK TWO Civilization has crumbled. YEAR TWENTY A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild. STATION ELEVEN Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after, Station Eleven charts the unexpected twists of fate that connect six people: famous actor Arthur Leander; Jeevan - warned about the flu just in time; Arthur's first wife Miranda; Arthur's oldest friend Clark; Kirsten, a young actress with the Travelling Symphony; and the mysterious and self-proclaimed 'prophet'. Thrilling, unique and deeply moving, Emily St.
John Mandel's Station Eleven is a beautiful novel that asks questions about art and fame and about the relationships that sustain us through anything - even the end of the world.
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.
