Imad Station Eleven Review

Imad Rizvi

Station Eleven Review

Station Eleven is the latest book written by Emily St. John Mandel. Mandel is effective in writing a captivating novel that shows the interconnection of different people’s lives and demonstrates the importance of the performing arts for comfort, especially in tough situations. She uses a variety of methods to compel the reader to keep on reading and learn more about the characters and plot as the book goes on.

Mandel brings the readers into the lives of different characters before and after the Georgia Flu wipes out most of the human population. Arthur Leander is a three-time divorced actor who dies on stage at a performance of King Lear. Jeevan is the former paparazzo, undergoing training to become a paramedic, who jumps on stage to try and save Arthur. Kirsten is the little girl with a small role in the play, who becomes part of the Travelling Symphony in the world after the Georgia Flu. The Travelling symphony travels around the post-apocalyptic country performing plays and symphonies to different towns they find. When they get to a town called St. Deborah by the Water, they find a strange prophet, who then follows them and kidnaps their friends as they make their way to Severn City Airport to find two missing orchestra members.

The structure of the chapters are creative and unique in the way that they jump around between perspectives and time periods. While it may seem a little confusing the way the chapters are organized, by switching the perspectives she allows us to learn about each character little by little and take in everything we learn about them as the book goes on. She provides an interesting blend of drama with Arthur in Hollywood, romance with Arthur and his wives, and action between the prophet’s gang and the Travelling Symphony. By the end, she has the reader’s interest in not only finding out what happens to the Travelling Symphony, but also in figuring out more about Arthur’s life before the Georgia Flu. Mandel allows our interest in each character to develop throughout the story with a structure of differing perspectives and experiences.

Sometimes, Mandel takes too much time describing insignificant parts of the text. For example, she should have given more information about what Tyler did between living in the airport and becoming the prophet at St. Deborah by the Water, and should have spent less time talking about Jeevan after the apocalypse. The prophet was the main antagonist, and it would have been fascinating to learn how Tyler developed along with this religious group and rose to the top to become their leader.

Mandel changes her voice throughout different sections of the story. She changes the way she organizes her structure and syntax to create unique styles in each section of the book.The contrast in her writing style between chapters full of characters having discussion, like Arthur out with friends, compared to chapters with more descriptions, like when Mandel describes Miranda creating her Station Eleven comics, is enjoyable. One example of her variation in style is when she gives an incomplete list of the things that are gone after the death of many from the Georgia Flu.

“No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars” (Mandel 32).

Mandel creates a unique style in this passage with her choices of structure and syntax. She uses a variety of short and long sentences, but all of them have the same start, by describing what there is no more of. This choice of structure gives the reader the impression that there are so many things gone after the Georgia Flu, that she needs a list to mention as many as she can. Rather than seeming repetitive, it emphasizes how many things are gone now. Her choices in syntax include using commas instead of separating the words into different sentences, to show the relation between a list of ideas. In long sentences, after informing the reader about a broad topic that is gone now, she goes into detail about all the small aspects of the topic that they will never see again. For example, after mentioning how social media is gone she describes all the different types of photos and updates that they will not see. Her simple choices to create a distinct style make this passage more enjoyable to the reader. This passage illustrates the way she changes her voice, as the rest of the book uses different styles to portray her ideas, and demonstrates the way she engages the reader with the contrast in style.

Mandel provides a blend of different perspectives, experiences, and writing styles that integrate together to form one cohesive story about the lives of characters before and after the Georgia Flu. While some parts and chapters of the book seemed unnecessary, the theme of the story is intriguing as it shows the connection of lives of seemingly unrelated characters, all with different paths in life. Mandel takes a new approach to the genre of post-apocalyptic books by putting a focus on the arts and their importance in the lives of many to bring happiness and comfort, even in difficult times. Station Eleven is an engrossing book worth reading.