Station Eleven Review

This week's novel is Station Eleven, post-apocalyptic literary fiction by Emily St. John Mandel.

Civilization collapses when 99.99% of the world's population dies of the Georgia Flu.  Twenty years after the collapse, The Traveling Symphony, an orchestra and Shakespearian theater troop, travels between the small settlements around the Great Lakes, keeping the arts alive.  This narrative is inter-cut with scenes from before the collapse, centering around the famous actor, Arthur Leander, who died of a heart attack on stage during a performance of King Lear the day before the collapse.  His life and that of his best friend, ex-wives, and son intersect with Kirsten's, an actress with the Traveling Symphony who was a child actress in King Lear and witnessed Leander's death.

A friend of mine told me that this felt like genre fiction written by someone who didn't like genre fiction, and that he'd be interested to hear what I thought about it, as someone more familiar with genre fiction than he is.  I kind of wish he hadn't said that, because it put me off the book for quite a while.  I don't want to read something coming from the premise that genre fiction is worthless but here's how you do it.  After reading it though, I don't get the impression that Mandel doesn't like genre fiction, just that that's not what she usually does and isn't going to start with this book even though it's set after society collapses.

As to what I think about it, as someone more familiar with genre fiction: I liked the post-apocalyptic parts better than the pre-apocalyptic parts.  The stakes were so much higher, and the situations so much more intriguing after the collapse.  The parts before the collapse had drama about a privileged actor wanting and then not wanting and then wanting attention, and drama about his ex-wife burying herself in her art. 

I also have strong opinions about some of the difficult questions brought up about how society should function after the collapse.  For example, the adults have a hard time explaining the world before the collapse to their children who never experienced it.  There's a debate that they shouldn't bother to teach their kids how life used to be because that won't help them live their lives post-collapse, is hard to explain, and makes the kids sad.  This is presented as a thought provoking conundrum, to which I say NO.  Nonononono! If they don't teach the next generation how electricity and vaccinations work, or--heck--general math and science and literature and history, that knowledge will disappear within a generation and the human race would have to start from scratch.  While I'm sure some people would ask so what, I believe very strongly that this is a bad thing, especially when it's possible to rebuild while the infrastructure is still in place.

This novel made me want to write a post-apocalyptic story about the folks that get the power plant working again (where I grew up in Texas, all our power was hydro-electric).  Or a story about the scientists who gather at the remains of a technical institute and start a school.

So, while the prose was beautiful throughout and the connections across time and circumstances were delicate and intriguing, I was drawn almost exclusively to the post-collapse world.

***

Next Week: The Raven King, the final installment in The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater.  So I'll be talking about the series as a whole.