“People want what was best about the world.”
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel strikes me as an extraordinarily powerful, deeply reflective novel which offers a welcome twist on the recurring themes found throughout the post-apocalyptic genre. Rather than confronting readers with a familiar cavalcade of nightmarish horrors inevitably resulting from civilizational collapse, the likes of which can be found in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winner The Road or Stephen King’s The Stand, in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven we are asked to consider what role art plays in the long-term survival of humanity. Following a massive global pandemic that nearly destroys humanity, Mandel wonders: would a lawless hellscape ensue? Or would there still be a desire to preserve the arts and eventually bring about a rebirth of civilization? In Station Eleven, the future post-pandemic world is littered with all the conveniences of the old, but we still find people craving art and literature and beauty and all the things that make life worth living. In this way, we are shown that life requires something more than mere subsistence and necessity. As Mandel has often stated in interviews, one way to write about something is to consider its absence, and therefore we are invited to ponder the unseen significance of the many conveniences we enjoy in our lives. What would happen to humanity if all the trappings of civilization were to suddenly disappear? Would we fall prey to our worst impulses (i.e. religious fanaticism) or would we instead celebrate and honor the best of us (i.e. Shakespeare)?
Station Eleven opens with the death of famous Hollywood actor Arthur Leander, a notorious philanderer and frequent object for tabloid fodder, who has a heart attack while onstage at the Elgin Theater performing the fourth act of King Lear. But his health crisis is soon overshadowed as it occurs mere hours before the outbreak of a deadly global plague (colloquially called the “Georgia Flu” because it is believed to have originated in the Caucasus) which strikes and kills millions upon millions of people, wholly ending modern society as we know it (bear in mind, Station Eleven was published in 2014, six years before the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic). In many ways, the Shakespearean opening of Arthur’s death sets the tone for the rest of the novel with a fascinating thematic motif. After all, Shakespeare himself lived through a tumultuous age (Elizabethan England) where several outbreaks of the plague forced the closure of London’s theaters (though not permanently), and by invoking King Lear, Mandel directs our attention toward the tragedy of an aging king of ancient Britain who attempts to divide his kingdom between his three daughters but his plan goes awry and the poor old man is forced out into the cold on a barren heath where a wild tempest blows across the land and a civil war erupts.
Not unlike the raging storm in King Lear, in Station Eleven a metaphorical storm has also throttled modern society and unleashed chaos. A mutated swine flu virus has emerged and it quickly spreads across the globe rapidly killing upwards of ninety percent of the population. Those that manage to survive must find new ways of flourishing, and one such example is The Traveling Symphony –a ragtag band of actors and musicians who travel together around the Lake Michigan region performing Shakespeare’s plays as well as various musical numbers in exchange for temporary food and lodging. Why do they remain uprooted instead of settling down? Because “people want what was best about the world,” and also “because survival is insufficient” (a slogan which they have sprayed along the sides of their caravan which is being towed by the symphony’s horses; Mandel borrowed the phrase from an episode of Star Trek Voyager). Acting is the raison d’être of The Traveling Symphony and they aren’t simply going to stop because of a pandemic.
Year one of the crisis was as horrific as you might imagine, many people simply blocked it out of their memories, but those who are older still remember what life was like back before the plague. Consider the passage below from a main character, Jeevan Chaudhary (a former paparazzo and bartender who is training to be a paramedic) when he first learns the truth of the rapidly spreading disease while aboard public transportation:
“Jeevan pulled the bell cord and made his way to the rear door. He found himself glancing at the other passengers. The young woman with groceries, the man in the business suit playing a game on his cell phone, the elderly couple conversing in Hindi. Had any of them come from the airport? He was aware of all of them breathing around him” (18).
Much of the action in the novel takes place “twenty years after the end of air travel” with various non-linear flashbacks interspersed throughout in order to reveal the backstories of all the characters, many of whom have unique connections to the late Arthur Leander. For example, Kirsten Raymonde was a child who played one of the young daughters in Arthur Leander’s final performance and now travels with the caravan of The Traveling Symphony; and Miranda Carroll, Arthur’s first ex-wife who worked as a shipping executive and had been writing a gripping science fiction comic book entitled “Station Eleven” (hence the title of the novel). We are only given brief glimpses, but the comic books is apparently about a futuristic earth which has been invaded by hostile aliens and a brilliant physicist named Dr. Eleven who managed to escape on a space station with a few hundred others and they are now hiding out in the uncharted regions of deep space, despite a group of rebels who have been captured by giant seahorses and are forced to dwell in the UnderSea of Station Eleven. After living for fifteen years in perpetual twilight, they now want to return to earth and take their chances with the aliens. Amazingly, in the novel this comic book manages to find its way into the hands of young Kirsten which she carries with her for some two decades on her post-pandemic journey.
However, despite the hopeful power of the arts, with desperate people comes a terrifying world. For example, in a town called St. Deborah by the Water, the Symphony is forced to flee from a frightening charismatic religious cult when its fearsome demagogue known only as “The Prophet” sends his minions after The Traveling Symphony in order to claim another bride for himself. Using the Bible as justification, this cult does not care how many people it kills in order to please The Prophet. In many ways, this unhappy little episode is a truly horrific reminder of the moral blight of religious fanaticism in modern society, a threat which lies ever-present just beneath the surface of our civilization. Meeting The Prophet marks the most nightmarish section of the book (imagine The Prophet as akin to David Koresh of the Branch Davidians).
Perhaps the most surprising characteristic of Station Eleven is how it forces readers to optimistically long for the extraordinary beauty of modern civilization, despite all its flaws. As we read along, we learn to value smart phones, and running water, and other luxuries we take for granted in new ways. In Station Eleven, “Hell is the absence of people you long for,” a reworking of Sartre’s infamous quip, “Hell is other people” because “if hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?” (148). And when all the lights go out, and the water stops running, and digital communication ceases, and the airplanes are all grounded, and vital medicines are no longer available, and all the other modern conveniences we enjoy suddenly disappear without warning, what things will we miss the most? Mandel seems to suggest that human creativity and the arts will be the things we treasure most, whether it is live performances as offered through The Traveling Symphony or visual artistry as presented in the comic book “Station Eleven.”
“On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, 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” (178).
Another key character we meet in the novel is Arthur’s best friend Clark who winds up trapped in the Severn City Airport during the outbreak of the pathogen with several hundred other people, but it turns out to be a fairly suitable place to dwell while the world is falling apart. As the years tick by and he begins to grow into an elderly man, Clark watches as traces of the old world start to disappear and younger people do not seem to know much about how the world once was. Inspired by his former boyfriend who was a museum curator, Clark decides to create the Museum of Civilization in the Skymiles Lounge in Concourse C of the airport to house all the things people used to take for granted, like canned food, cell phones, computers, books, printers, credit cards, drivers licenses, gasoline, supply chain products, schools, running water, restaurants, and so on.
“Because he had been sleepwalking, Clark realized, moving half-asleep through the motions of his life for a while now, years; not specifically unhappy, but when had he last found real joy in his work? When was the last time he’d been truly moved by anything? When had he last felt awe or inspiration?” (164).
“Toward the end of his second decade in the airport, Clark was thinking about how lucky he’d been. Not just the mere fact of survival, which was of course remarkable in and of itself, but to have seen one world end and another begin” (231).
As the novel unfolds, we start to piece together the elaborate string of connections between all of these main characters and the late Arthur Leander. But the most shocking reveal of all comes when The Prophet is shown to be Arthur’s only son Tyler who once lived at the Severn City Airport when he was just a boy with his deeply religious mother Elizabeth Colton (Tyler also has a dog named Luli which was also the name of the Pomeranian Miranda once had when she was married to Arthur). Luckily, The Traveling Symphony manages to defeat The Prophet in a highly tense confrontation scene just before arriving at the Severn City Airport.
In the end, Kirsten decides to leave a copy of her prized “Station Eleven” comic book in the Museum of Civilization, and Clark, now an elderly man, soon realizes that the author of “Station Eleven” was actually Miranda, the first ex-wife of his friend Arthur (he recognizes a dinner party scene he once shared with Miranda many years earlier). Out on the horizon, lights begin to flicker in the next city over. Slowly, civilization is rebuilding itself.
“Clark looks up at the evening tarmac, at the planes that have been grounded for twenty years, the reflection of his candle flickering in the glass. He has no expectation of seeing airplane rise again in his lifetime, but is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhaps vessels are setting out even now, traveling toward or away from him, steered by sailors armed with maps and knowledge of the stars, driven by need or perhaps simply by curiosity: whatever became of the countries on the other side? If nothing else, it’s pleasant to consider the possibility. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, toward another world just out of sight” (332-333, closing lines of the novel).
Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, NY, 2014.
Station Eleven was dedicated to the memory of Emilie Jacobson, Mandel’s literary agent at Curtis Brown who died in 2010 at the age of 85. She had worked at Curtis Brown for 62 years.
“The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as then, it is too much.
There is too much world” –Czeslaw Milosz, The Separate Notebooks
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