Station Eleven- Emily St. John Mandel
By: Hannah Johnson
“Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”
In Emily St. John Mandel’s brilliant and dystopian Station Eleven, a violent plague consumes society faster than humanity can stop it, and soon, humanity, as it’s known, has ceased. It’s the end of times, and only some survive in this new, wild world, full of the destruction of what was once a thriving society.
What is left is some of the barest, rawest, or most intimate forms of humanity, including elements such as love, art, and violence. One group of survivors is The Traveling Symphony, a group going around and performing Shakespeare, still putting on these famous and adored performances in end times, with what they can manage. It’s a nod to continuation, as the novel begins with Arthur Leander putting on a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear and suddenly dying on stage (much like the character Lear himself did). This is shortly before the virus breaks out, and a haunting scene of the last of humanity before this invisible death soon upends everything. In a moment, the performance, whether that’s a Shakespeare show or life as it’s known, is over.
Another group traveling around revealing the more dangerous side of humanity and vulnerability, is the figure of “The Prophet” and his followers, an examination on a violent and distorted side of humanity whilst living in the end. The Prophet and his group are a menacing, sinister shadow always lurking too close. Mandel is able to create that sense of dread, anxiety, and danger, as the big wide world stretches all around these remaining survivors, but the danger is too close, right behind those who try to get away before it’s too late.
The novel brilliantly, through its progression, shows characters intersecting at different points in time, including when The Prophet is a child, living in an airport with others, stuck there from when the disaster broke out. Groups and people come together and break apart over time, including with these seedlings of the Prophet in the airport, the unsettling behavior and ideas already set in motion in his childhood, Arthur’s multiple relationships, two brothers trapped in the city that blinks out as the world shatters, and more. Each of Mandel’s characters and how they relate to each other is done so well, deliberate and purposeful. The story is able to organize and solve itself, slotting together, perfectly, like a puzzle. It’s a story within stories, layered so complexly but brilliantly.
As well as with the brilliant characterization and organization within this story, the novel provides a different, intimate lens for the world. It’s the world between its natural beauty and the remnants of destruction of human society. Destruction is everywhere in this novel, both metaphorically and socially through the broken society, and through the physical proof of many humans disappearing, with structures left to the elements. This novel is left to a true nature of things, (one can argue socially or literally with the physical world). Nature is perhaps a nearly unstoppable force that will continue to grow up through the cracks as more time passes, and provide a new way of looking at the world that one wouldn’t have noticed before, in society. Ultimately, one can then ask the question, after such a disease cracks the world wide open, spilling the guts out and wiping out nearly everything, if society could ever return back to “normal.”
