Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.Station Eleven has put my mind in a whirl, and in order to figure out why that is, this review will need to be somewhat long and spoilery. As the book opens, famed movie star Arthur Leander is appearing as King Lear in Toronto when he suffers a fatal heart attack. From the audience leaps Jeevan Chaudhary to attempt CPR, and watching from upstage, is eight-year old Kirsten Raymonde; a child actress who had become attached to Arthur as they worked together. On his way home from the theatre, Jeevan receives a phone call from a doctor friend warning him that the Georgia Flu -- a virus that nobody was really paying attention to because it only affected people in that former Soviet republic -- had suddenly arrived in the city with an alarmingly efficient fatality rate (eventually 99.99% of all humanity would be wiped out). As the book progresses -- jumping around from thirty years before until twenty years after the fall of civilisation -- Arthur proves to be the nexus around which everyone else's stories revolve.
All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient."Because survival is insufficient" (a quote from Star Trek Voyager) is essentially the theme of Station Eleven and is important enough to Kirsten that she had it tattooed on her forearm when she was fifteen. As a member of the Traveling Symphony, Kirsten wanders from settlement to settlement along the Great Lakes (a full circuit takes about two years), performing Shakespeare and supporting the symphonic portion of the show by scouting abandoned buildings for spare instrument parts and other useful items. (The troop originally wanted to perform modern plays but were surprised that audiences were more interested in Shakespeare; in preserving what they thought was the best of human culture.) In Year Twenty, Kirsten is most interested in: acting; finding old gossip magazines that might have pictures of her obsession, Arthur Leander; and hoping to find more issues of the limited run comic book -- Station Eleven -- that Arthur gave her on the day he died. By this time, the chaos of the first years post-collapse has been settled, and while The Traveling Symphony feels safe enough to be on the road, they do so with armed outriders in front and behind of the main caravan and have sentries watching over them at night. While passing through a familiar town, they find it has been taken over by "the prophet" and his followers, and a confrontation between the two groups seems inevitable.
Jeevan Chaudhary also knows that "survival is insufficient": having started as a wedding photographer, Jeevan became a paparazzo for the better money, and although he keeps popping up at the edges of Arthur's rise to fame, it was never a career Jeevan felt good about. Jeevan finally recognised that money wasn't everything and was training to become a paramedic when the pandemic hit.
So, too, did Arthur realise too late that his lust for fame and fortune had destroyed everything meaningful in his life (his family/roots and childhood friendships, three marriages and a non-relationship with his only child). If there's any consolation for the man who died before the world ended, it's that his image continues to live on in some of the last magazines ever put together.
Arthur's best friend, Clark Thompson, was a corporate coach -- collecting 360°s from a target's coworkers and turning their comments into a personal growth plan -- and just before society collapsed, Clark realised that he had become a "high-functioning sleepwalker", just like many of his targets. Remembering the joy-filled acting classes that he and Arthur took when they first met as teenagers in Toronto, Clark regretted his meaningless life path (because "survival is insufficient").
The last character whose point-of-view we share is Miranda Carroll -- Arthur's first wife and the creator of the comic Station Eleven. She alone seems to have understood how to live a fulfilled life, and although she took much satisfaction from her role as a high-profile shipping executive, she never stopped making art. The comic itself seems to parallel the post-collapse world: in it, an alien force has come to Earth and enslaved all of its citizens, but one lone space station -- a moon-sized Earth-like satellite named Station Eleven -- escapes through a wormhole. Due to some malfunctions, the station is mostly covered in water, small islands of civilisation are connected with bridges, the artificial sun is forever at a mood-darkening twilight, and a rebel population -- the Underseas -- lives on the ocean floor and wants the station to return to Earth at any cost (because "survival is insufficient").
Okay, that's a lot of plot, but there's a lot happening in Station Eleven: the story is inventive, relatable to today's world (like all the best post-apocalyptic novels) and populated with fully-realised characters. There are small scenes that stick out in my mind as moments of absolute truth (Jeevan bunkering down with his brother; Miranda leaving the dinner party; an airplane under quarantine at the edge of a runway) and the web of story arcs that lead back to Arthur were skillfully handled. I was interested enough in the plot to have read the book quickly, and yet…I guess I just like my dystopias grittier than this.
The violence and chaos of the time immediately following the collapse is referred to but never shown -- indeed, Kirsten has completely blocked out the first year, and fingering a scar on her cheek, she's happy to have forgotten it. In the time of Year Twenty (at least in Upper Michigan), the woods are filled with deer and rabbits, a golf course pond is so teeming with fish that only a net is required for fishing, and even though stepping on a nail is a death sentence, survival doesn't appear to balance on a knife's edge. Every settlement and outpost has armed sentries, but other than the prophet's, this is precautionary: it seems everyone is happy to welcome travellers if they don't pose a threat, and resources are plentiful enough that groups are free to settle anywhere there's room. And while the menace of the prophet was real enough, it resolved itself fairly quickly and there was very little tension in this book. This is a kinder, gentler post-apocalypse than I'm used to, and that's not necessarily a negative.
What I didn't completely buy into was the fetishisation of what came before the collapse: The Traveling Symphony performs only classical music and Shakespearian plays, and while I do understand that this might be considered preserving the best of what came before, I'd think that making art (because "survival is insufficient") would include creating new art; writing music and plays that interpret the new reality. For that matter, instead of combing half-collapsed schools for clarinet reeds and bow rosin, where are the musicians who can make novel instruments out of what's readily available? At the airport hangar, the Museum of Civilization has a collection of cell phones, credit cards, lap tops, and stiletto heels -- but do these represent the height of civilization? Or do they, perhaps, fetishise the most hollow of our artefacts? As Arthur had been concerned about immortality in his lifetime, his presence in gossip magazines and a tell-all book provides just that; and in retrospect, justifies Jeevan's years as a paparazzo (but should today's vacuous celebrity culture and the parasites who feed off it be remembered fondly post-apocalypse?) Even the fictional inhabitants of the mirrored comic book world have those who fetishise the past: why would the Underseas want to force Station Eleven to return to Earth -- where they would join the slave force for the aliens -- just because their new world is wet and dark? As a reader, it seemed so obvious that returning to Earth (yearning for a past that can't be recaptured) was nonsensical, but as the Traveling Symphony and Museum of Civilization were presented as noble endeavors, it seemed a mixed message: perhaps, sometimes, survival is all one can hope for.
There was so much in Station Eleven that I liked -- and some that didn't work for me (I don't even want to go into what felt wrong about Pablo and V.) -- and my final evaluation would put it at around 3.5 stars, in this case, rounded down to 3 (this is why my mind is whirling). But that's not a recommendation against this book; many readers have found much valuable in it and it would be worthwhile for anyone to have a look at.
