Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Station Eleven's prose is beautiful. It won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 2015, so that's kind of expected. It's received some criticism, mostly by people who claim this is a sci-fi novel that thinks of itself as too literary to be sci-fi. But the actual story seems to show a love of or at least nostalgia for science fiction, with one of the central aspects of the story being a sci-fi comic book that is one woman's most beloved artistic achievement.

The story is kind of a post-apocalyptic tale of creating art in a world where everyone is simply trying to survive, and also a pre-apocalyptic tale of creating art in a world where everyone is simply trying to survive. It's certainly full of real, strong characters who try to achieve great things and are often thwarted either by their circumstances or themselves or their deaths. I'm not a huge fan of the actual plot, to be honest. The way the story is structured, it's really just non-chronological snapshots of peoples' lives, some of whom were killed by the virus that killed off most of the world, some who survived, and some who died before. But the actual plot is simply a young woman trying to find a friend who was not where she left her. There's a lot of beauty character-establishing story that connects to the woman, but it all seems peripheral - which is not to say that non-plot elements were unnecessary or weak, but that maybe the plot should have been something that better integrates and builds on the good parts of the book. I'm pretty sure the main point of the book isn't the plot but the interconnected nature of all the characters, but there's very little point to the story other than how people are all connected and everyone is trying to do more than survive.

The main character, Kirsten, lives post-apocalypse with the Travelling Symphony, a group of survivors who, well, travel and perform both Shakespeare and symphonies. They return to a village they had visited before, where they left one of their members who wanted to settle down for a few years while she raised a daughter. But the woman isn't there, and they soon realize that the town has changed, taken over by a group of religious zealots lead by a prophet. Kirsten and the Symphony set out to find their missing member, who they hear fled to a community that lives in what used to be an airport, and get attacked along the way by the prophet's men.

Before the apocalypse, Kirsten was a child actress. The night the virus reached America she was performing with a man named Arthur Leander, who has a heart attack and dies on stage. Aside from Kirsten, the book follows Arthur's life until that moment, one of his many wives, Arthur's best friend, and the man who rushed onto the stage to try to save Arthur's life. Of these, Arthur's wife is easily the most interesting. The former-paparazzo-turned-EMT who tries to save Arthur has about four scenes and is ultimately disappointing; he and Kirsten are the only pre-apocalypse characters to survive to the story's "present," but they never interact despite being physically close and the fact that they would both be better off if they interacted. Again, the point is probably that despite how close their lives are, people are alone in their attempt to live meaningfully and real life doesn't always work out in the way that makes the best story. But again, I think that makes this a weaker story. There's a sense of things building that I wanted to culminate, and there is a (very weak) payoff when Kirsten finally gets to the airport and meets Leander's best friend, but ultimately I think the novel was in conflict: it wanted the climax with a confluence of interconnected stories, but also wanted to be primarily about characters who couldn't have or didn't take part in that climax.

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