Station Eleven out of Ten

Station Eleven out of Ten

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth,” writes Miranda, a foundational character in Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 novel, Station Eleven, in her comic series of the same name. As Miranda addresses, Station Eleven acts, in many respects, as an homage to modern comforts. Set in a future world reeling from the Georgian Flu, a pandemic which kills most of humanity in days and causes the deterioration of all modern technology, Mandel’s novel is indeed a love letter to the comforts we take for granted. Characters navigate their ravaged world in a sense of daze. Relics of the past, small as a broken cell phone or a stranger’s passport, are treated with a sense of reverence. However, Mandel’s novel is far more than the pandemic that surrounds it. Instead, through a masterfully intertwined plot encompassing scenes from both the world today and one ravaged by disaster, Station Eleven skillfully explores the bonds tying us all.

The novel opens with a showing of King Lear, in which Arthur Leander, a renowned actor famous for a confident onscreen persona but a shaky love life offscreen, has a heart attack while performing onstage. Mandel explores the characters surrounding this scene, ranging from Jeevan, a paramedic who attempts to save Arthur during his onstage collapse to Kirsten, a child actor and distant acquaintance to Leander who later adapts to the apocalyptic world with a sense of brutal finesse. From Arthur’s death onward, the novel jumps through a variety of perspectives in a nonlinear format - from Miranda to Jeevan to another host of perspectives, pre to post-apocalypse - in a manner that initially appears both jarring and superfluous. However, despite the novel’s most obvious conflict, the Georgian Flu, it isn’t pandemic that unifies the wide cast in Station Eleven; it’s their links to Leander. Through masterful prose and carefully placed passages, Mandel manages to unite seemingly disparate characters with a connection as simple as a single person. At one moment, Kirsten is travelling a ravaged world; in the next scene, a teenaged Arthur reconciles the contradictions between his small hometown and the bustling, impersonal city of Toronto. The two scenes, while seemingly unrelated, hold significance representative of the novel’s framework itself: meaningful parallels. Station Eleven’s strength lies not only in its ability to create such a convincing cast, but its capacity to build subtle links between them. Apocalypse is placed beside tranquility, businesswomen by scenes of travelling prophets, and it’s a testament to Mandel’s skill that the transition feels completely natural. The scenery, while inevitably unrelatable during apocalyptic scenes, is developed without detracting from the characters themselves. In effect, it’s voice at its finest.

In particular, Mandel’s excellent character development is seen during the novel’s brief lapse into epistolary narration. This excerpt from the in-universe novel Dear V, a collection of the letters Arthur Leander sends to his childhood friend throughout his adult life, clearly shows the progression of Arthur’s voice: from an unsure teenager to an equally unsure celebrity who’s unable to show it. The letters begin with long, winding sentences and tangential asides, which give readers the impression that they are having a conversation with Arthur rather than reading a summary of his life. Sentences abound with excessive “ands” and underlined words, as if Arthur is standing next to readers and talking animatedly about his life. However, even with these expressions of emotion, the letters clearly display everything Arthur is not saying, too. Though the letters are supposedly a “repository for [Arthur’s] thoughts” (Mandel 210), these inner thoughts are seldom stated outright. In fact, many of the descriptions in Dear V are statements of fact: Arthur’s impressions of Toronto, his friends, and his feelings towards home. These are things Arthur could tell anyone. It’s only on rare occasions that these facts are peppered with shorter, less descriptive, and ultimately more telling sentences like “I’m a terrible actor and this city is fucking freezing and I miss you” (Mandel 154). It’s in these short, clipped statements of emotion that Arthur’s true voice is seen. By making the letters seemingly emotional while still hiding many of Arthur’s true thoughts, Mandel paints the portrait of a man unsure, insecure, and ultimately unable to admit it. It’s in scenes like these, written with a finesse that subtly emphasizes the uncertainty of the world around us, that Mandel’s characters gain their true shine.

While Station Eleven continually expresses a longing for a world lost, it leaves readers with no such discontent. Instead, in a masterful novel crossing time, place, and perspective, Mandel seamlessly links disparate facets of humanity. The novel moves at a brisk pace without the detriment of its characters, resulting in a nuanced and distinguishable cast, while parallels between worlds ravaged and privileged clearly highlight the nuances of life around us. With its brisk pace and dynamic cast of characters, Station Eleven perfectly captures feelings of world-weary longing, while leaving readers with no such unfulfillment about the book itself.