This book has been on my list for ages, I first found it when a philosophy podcast I listen to brought it up as something that one of the hosts has been enjoying recently. Then then ended up doing a full episode talking about both the book and the HBO series it was adapted into. I haven’t seen the series yet, I’ll almost certainly write it up when I do, but first I want to cover the book itself.
The story takes place in North America around the Great Lakes region both before and after a fictional flu-like pandemic wipes out most of civilization. The story starts with the on stage death of Arthur, an actor playing King Lear in the Shakespeare play. The time line jumps around a lot to before and after the pandemic hits but it shows how all of the characters’ lives intermingle and where they all end up. The night of Arthur’s death one of the audience members, Jeevan, is a former paparazzi turned paramedic and he gets up on stage to perform CPR. On his way home that night, he gets a call from an old friend who is a doctor at a hospital and he tells Jeevan about the flu that’s come to the region and to get out. Jeevan proceeds to stock up on supplies and hole up with his wheelchair-bound brother, Frank. Also there the night of Arthur’s death is Kirsten, a child actor who has a non-speaking role in the show. Most of the narration after the collapse follows her as she performs with the Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel around performing symphonies and Shakespeare plays. Their whole philosophy is that “survival is not enough” (a line taken from Star Trek) and that you need preservation of art and culture too. The novel’s title comes from a pair of comic books that Kirsten has called “Station Eleven,” and it turns out that these books were authored by Arthur’s first wife Miranda.
The Traveling Symphony has a run-in at one of the towns they perform in with this guy called the Prophet who has formed a sort of doomsday cult around himself. They believe that since they were spared from the flu that they are better than the others that died and so on. The Prophet keeps several wives and believes in the divine purpose of his deeds so it’s pretty hard to argue with him. As the Symphony leave his next bride (a twelve year old girl) stows away in the supplies and they end up getting hunted down be the Prophet and his followers. They eventually end up at an airport, where a Museum of Civilization has been set up and is run by Clark, one of Arthur’s old friends. There they learn that the Prophet is Tyler, Arthur’s son. In the final conflict Tyler is shot by one of his own followers and it is further revealed that he has the only other copy of “Station Eleven.”
There is so much going on in this book, as you can tell from the summary. The timeline jumps back and forth and between characters as well. You hear from everyone, including Kirsten, Jeevan, Arthur, Miranda, Clark, and probably others that I forgot about. Somehow it doesn’t become confusing, which I think is partially due to excellent planning and how details come back and get mentioned multiple times. (How many ex-wives does Arthur have? Good thing they keep mentioning there’s three.) The author also keeps sliding in how long pre-pandemic the characters have so you can easily figure out the timeline before the collapse. All of which makes it relatively easy to follow along with.
Mandel also is not pulling any punches here. The book starts with a character dying and plenty more die along the way. There’s a global pandemic, many of the characters are doomed from the start or just disappear and we don’t know what becomes of them. Having now lived though the COVID-19 pandemic, she gets so many things right. I’m honestly amazed that this was written in 2015. The shock and not realizing what is happening until it’s too late is really spot on. All of the initial reactions of the characters to the disease hit so close to home I had to take a break at points.
There are sections that are so incredibly sad. But this really isn’t a sad or depressing book. If anything it ends on an optimistic note that human culture and human beings carry on and find a way through all of this tragedy. Shakespeare is still being performed, music is still made, people are preserving things of past lives in museums, and there’s so many people that band together to help each other. There’s one emotional passage where Frank is writing about immortality and how art can preserve people forever so they are never really forgotten after they die. And that’s what this book does both for its characters and for art as a whole.
This book was amazing, easily the best thing that I have
read in a while. I’m going to for sure check out the tv series that was created
based on it, and will probably come back with a comparison of the two, what one
medium does better than another, things like that.
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