Dystopian novels aren’t my thing and when I heard that the next book for the book club I frequent was about people surviving after a disastrous epidemic I figured I’d skip it but the folks at One More Page Books convinced me to go ahead and read Station Eleven. Overall, I’d say this is one of those instances where sharing a book made it better. (Plenty of books are magical when you read them on your own.) After the discussion, I had a great appreciation for the author’s skill and I have to say the book stayed in my thoughts for days afterward.
Using the interwoven stories of characters who are part of the approximately one percent of the world that survive after a deadly, fast-acting illness spreads, St. John Mandel reminds us that few of us are really prepared for the catastrophic. But this isn’t a survival manual but rather an examination of the how we need something to believe in to survive.
The book’s main characters are connected through a man who is an anti-hero of sorts: actor Arthur Leander is on stage playing the title role in King Lear when he collapses and dies. Jeevan, a paramedic-in-training in the audience, rushes to help Leander to no avail. Meanwhile, backstage young Kirsten, a future member of the Symphony, witnesses the death of a co-star who had been kind to her. Other people connected to the actor also play integral roles in the story.
Post-epidemic, the members of the Symphony set out to help themselves and others through art and performance. Despite the dangers they face, they travel in a caravan using the motto “Survival is Insufficient” to spur themselves on. They are sometimes welcomed and sometimes meet hostile people who understandably don’t trust them. And of course, there is the danger all people face: that someone will do them harm to take what they have. The Symphony travels a circuit they consider safe but in visiting a town they’d been to before, they find it is now under the sway of the prophet, a man who has created his own religion in which those who follow him were spared because they are righteous while those who don’t follow his precepts (such as those who don’t want to themselves or their daughters to be one of the prophet’s wives) must flee to save themselves.
One of Arthur’s friends ends up at an airport with a group of people who were untouched by the illness. In the early days, wanderers got the idea that the airport was contaminated so they stayed away. Eventually, word gets out that there are people doing alright there and the airport becomes kind of a mecca of stability.
The chapters weave together and contrast difficult lives of post-pandemic survival with Arthur’s life. After finding some success as an actor, Arthur stumbles through a few marriages. His first wife, Miranda, hails from the same Canadian island as he does. It is she who spends years working on a comic called Station Eleven. Unlike Arthur’s other wives, Miranda manages to find some satisfaction after her marriage to Arthur ends.
Someone told me you don’t need to know Shakespeare to understand this book, and you but it helps. First, it helps to understand why the staging of the production of King Lear that kicks off the book is unusual. And then there are all the parallels with King Lear. Plus, Miranda is the name of Prospero’s daughter in “The Tempest.” Arthur can be considered a Lear-like figure in a sense: instead of three daughters, he has three wives and only one of them matures.
In any case, the discussion of how people would survive a pandemic got pretty deep and a little divisive (just a little). What many of us did agree on was that the “Station Eleven” comic element was weak. Although it does connect some characters (the comic survives the pandemic and Kirsten stumbles upon it), it wasn’t a strong thread because the “Station Eleven” story elements seemed vague.
We discussed how the book hints at but does not delve into the most horrific things the characters experienced before people began to try to establish some kind of civilization. You have an idea what they’ve been through but it is not completely detailed. In addition to wondering if we’d even survive the illness, the hostile human element, and as one person pointed out, the animals that seemed to be missing from the book, we contrasted the seeming stability of the airport with the roaming life of The Symphony, and the uncertainty of throwing your lot in with whoever was nearby.
