Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven centers on a dystopian future where an epidemic wipes out ninety-nine percent of the world’s population. Mandel, a Canadian novelist, has written four novels and is a respected author. She has written Station Eleven in a way that encompasses every aspect and situation that would take place if, sometime in the near future, there were to be a sudden widespread disease. She includes all emotions, violence, and just the right amount of humanity into the novel. Mandel lays the truth bare and cold about the behavior of humans without the rules of society. She makes us see the reality and hooks us in from the very first page. Station Eleven is unlike other science fiction novels. It is engaging and appealing because the characters are realistic, the scenes are touching, and the storyline is suspenseful.
Kirsten Raymonde, one of the survivors of the Georgia Flu, is part of the Travelling Symphony. She is one of the actors and is about twenty-eight years old. The outbreak of the pandemic started when she was eight years old. She, along with the other actors, conductor, and musicians, try to preserve art by traveling across the remains of what used to be America. They go from town to town to perform Shakespeare. Most towns are welcoming and appreciative of the Traveling Symphony’s work, but some have turned dangerous and unpredictable. The novel also goes back into the pre-apocalyptic life, where the focus is on an actor, Arthur Leander, an author, Miranda, and a journalist, Jeevan.
Mandel produced characters that are realistic. They make mistakes and are not all heroes. Kirsten cheated on her boyfriend merely out of boredom and Arthur Leander had an affair with his co-star. Station Eleven’s authentic characters allow us to understand and connect to them. We are able to step into their shoes and see what it is like to be them, or what it would be like if we were one of them. Mandel does an exceptional job in describing her characters to us. “Her backpack was a child-size, red canvas with a cracked and faded image of Spider-Man, and in it she carried as little as possible: two glass bottles of water that in a previous civilization had held Lipton Iced Tea, a sweater, a rag she tied over her face in dusty houses, a twist of wire for picking locks, the ziplock bag that held her tabloid collection and the Dr. Eleven comics, and a paperweight” (Mandel 66). Mandel makes it clear that Kirsten likes to collect information about the past, and essentially about her past. This is because she keeps magazine tabloids and goes through old houses.
Mandel also produces scenes that are touching. She describes the characters’ actions and emotions in a way that makes us feel for them. She also writes the scenes descriptively and uses a variety of sentence lengths to make the scenes dramatic. Every event that she explores and every word she writes has a purpose. “A rape on the night of the Day Eighty-five, the airport woken after midnight by a woman's scream. They tied the man up until sunrise and then drove him into the forest at gunpoint, told him if he returned he’d be shot. ‘I’ll die out here alone,’ he said, sobbing, and no one disagreed but what else could they do” (Mandel 252). Mandel’s use of long sentences result in a dynamic and suspenseful tone. She describes without saying too much, allowing us to think for ourselves.
Station Eleven’s storyline has proven to be suspenseful with it’s many cliffhangers and mysterious scenes. Without making it obvious, Mandel creates a mystery and slowly unravels it throughout the book. The results are unexpected and thrilling. “ ‘What were you doing?’ ‘I’m reading to the people inside,’ Tyler said. ‘There’s no one in there.’ But of course there was. Clark was chilled in the sunlight. The plane remained sealed, because opening it was a nightmare no one wanted to think about, because no one knew if the virus could be contracted from the dead, because it was as good a mausoleum as any. He’d never been this close to it. The plane’s windows were dark” (Mandel 259). Mandel gives us the impression that there is something peculiar about Tyler, but she does not touch on it until much later.
Station Eleven tells a remarkable story told through the experiences of many different characters and scenes. The authenticness of the characters allow us to connect to them, and the scenes and storyline are full of the right amount of contrast between emotions. Throughout the novel, Mandel has us on the edge, and for some, on the verge of tears.
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