balancedshelf
6/2/2015
Actor Arthur Leander dies onstage during a production of King Lear; hours later, an epidemic of Georgian flu begins killing people and eventually wipes out most of humanity. In Station Eleven, we learn about life of Arthur Leander, a thrice-married actor, and about those people whose lives intersected with his, both pre- and post-apocalypse. In particular, Mandel focuses on Leander's first wife, Miranda, who spends years of her life perfecting her comic "Station Eleven", as well as with Kirsten, a child actor who witnessed his death and whose most treasured possession in the apocalypse is Miranda's comic.
This is a haunting and incredibly moving narrative, and is one of my favourite reads in recent memory. Station Eleven is an exploration of the things we use to mark or measure our lives; all the mundane and strange, superficial and profound things that we derive joy and meaning from. It's an introspective take on a genre that is often grim and action-packed. This is not the exciting tale of survival in post-apocalyptic times, but a mournful and lyrical elegy for what has been lost.
Mandel focuses on a number of seemingly disparate characters pre- and post-apocalypse, but as readers we see the threads that connect them to each other, even when the characters themselves do not. There are a lot of post-apocalyptic books out there, and a lot of them brutal: people are torn apart by zombies, bandits, monsters. Station Eleven is not brutal, but it drives home the senselessness of the post-apocalyptic world. For example, one minor character perishes from stepping on a nail - the sort of totally unremarkable, ignoble thing that becomes deadly in a world without tetanus vaccines or advanced medical care.