Emily St. John Mandel is an unwittingly prescient novelist. Anton Waker, of The Singer’s Gun, is involved in the matter of an illegal shipping container. His cargo: young Russian women who are desperate to get into the States. At the time of this book’s release, the state of Arizona passed legislation forcing immigrants to carry their naturalization papers at all times.
With Station Eleven, St. John Mandel has once again touched upon topics in the headlines and society’s concerns for the near future. Here with an influenza epidemic. In this alarmingly realistic work, the world is swept by the Georgia Flu Pandemic. Within days, the global population is decimated.
The story opens in the present day. Famous if fading actor Arthur Leander is playing Lear when a heart attack fells him onstage. Jeevan Chaudhary, onetime paparazzi, now an EMT-in-training, rushes from the audience to assist. Chadhaury then comforts child actress Kirsten Raymonde.
Kirsten won’t recall much from this time. She’ll remember bits about Arthur Leander, who treated her kindly. She’ll carry his gifts to her in a backpack: a glass paperweight and two exquisitely illustrated comic books titled Station Eleven.
The comic books are the work of Arthur Leander’s first wife, Miranda. It seems St. John Mandel must be fascinated with cargo containers, for Miranda, an artist, works for a shipping company. Dr. Eleven of Station Eleven is a physicist who helps a group of people escape Earth after a hostile alien takeover. The group lives on a damaged space station in perpetual twilight. Under benign alien rule, many long to return to Earth, and this creates a schism within their social structure.
Miranda, Arthur, and their author are all Canadian. What is it about Canada that incites apocalyptic narratives? See Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, and now St. John Mandel. Then again, Stephen King, who wrote the mother of all flu novels, The Stand, hails from Maine, which is arguably so far north in America that it practically is Canada. Perhaps a better question is, Why do freezing winters turn a writer’s thoughts toward calamitous illness?
Readers see the pandemic through Jeevan Chaudhary’s eyes. After a doctor friend telephones a warning from the ER, Jeevan doggedly loads up on supplies, then holes up with his brother, Frank. A Reuters journalist who took a bullet to the spine, Frank is wheelchair-bound. Trapped in his apartment, he watches as the Georgia flu swiftly shuts civilization down. He doesn’t catch the flu. It doesn’t matter.
St. John Mandel keeps the violence muted, setting an elegiac tone that pervades the novel. Chapter six casts a sharp eye on all that is lost, beginning with the sentence: “An incomplete list.” Chlorinated swimming pools, night-lit baseball diamonds, planes, trains, and automobiles. No pharmaceuticals. No cities, no governments. No internet. “No avatars.”
While reading Station Eleven, I needed to replace the compact disc player in my van. My vehicle is customized with a wheelchair ramp and specialty lockdown system that “grabs” my husband’s wheelchair when he rolls into place. It is, in effect, a steel seatbelt.
I arrived at the car stereo shop early. I parked, reached for Station Eleven, but found myself looking at the van’s passenger side. The seat is gone; in its place, the lockdown rises from the floor, a precisely fabricated steel arm, fitted exactly to my husband’s power wheelchair, incidentally also a custom item. The van requires gasoline. The wheelchair batteries require a nightly dose of electricity to fully recharge. I thought about Frank Chaudhary. I stared at this space for a long time.
Kirsten, now a young woman, is a member of the Symphony, a traveling group of actors and musicians. The Symphony stages Shakespeare to grateful communities who have regrouped in the flu’s wake.
The Symphony travels to St. Deborah by the Water, a Michigan town where, two years earlier, two members were left behind. Charlie (Charlotte) was about give birth. Her partner Jeremy stayed with her. Now the Symphony will perform A Midsummer’s Night Dream, collect their friends, and move on.
The bustling community of two years ago is changed: a “prophet” has taken over. Believers are held in a terrified, cult-like state. Non-believers, including Charlie and Jeremy, are driven out.
The Prophet, who could easily be the most stereotypically outlandish character becomes, in St. John Mandel’s hands, subtly, terrifyingly believable. As Station Eleven progresses, readers begin realizing not only who the Prophet is, but how he came to exist. He makes chilling sense.
Station Eleven is St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, the culmination of a steadily accruing skill. It has been long-listed for a National Book Award, taking its rightful with Elizabeth MacCracken’s Thunderstruck and Jane Smiley’s Some Luck.
Fans of The Stand may find parallels to Station Eleven‘s dénouement, involving a shared destination, a biblical showdown between good and evil, and the human need to start anew. t. John Mandel’s characters are touching in their hungers for art and compulsion to document the past. Their essential goodness is equally touching.
Despite terrible circumstance, Station Eleven’s characters choose to act with dignity, kindness, and civility. United in their drive recreate the best of a lost world, they behave with decency. In this, Station Eleven is profoundly hopeful. I only hope it isn’t an instruction manual.