As we pass the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 lockdown, Emily St. John Mandel’s dystopian novel, “Station 11,” is as beautiful and relevant as ever. The book, which made it to The New York Times “100 Best Books of the 21st Century” list, flashes forward and backward in time, telling the intertwining stories of a fascinating cast of characters before and after an apocalyptic pandemic sweeps the earth.
For those of you who think they have heard too much about contagious diseases in the past half-decade, you are wrong. This book is unlike any other dystopian novel I have read; it is a story about the end of the world, and yet it is about Shakespeare, a performance troupe, a cult, an unpublished graphic novel and a museum in a defunct airport. How can all of these things come together across two timelines and dozens of characters into a successful story? I have no idea, but Mandel accomplishes it effortlessly and eloquently in her shockingly short book.
Honestly, there was not much I did not like about this book. Some literary criticism, however, takes issue with Mandel’s portrayal of disaster and its aftermath. According to a New York Times review, although Mandel imagines the worst epidemic scenario possible, the descriptions of the characters’ psychological responses and their corresponding behaviors are not representative of the extreme trauma that this level of apocalyptic change would warrant. To me, this can be explained by the fact that Mandel is not primarily a dystopian writer. And while the book could be read as under-emotional, in some way that confers more meaning in ordinary details by centering feelings of nostalgia, grief and hope around everyday objects and occurrences. This could be a positive or negative quality, depending on who is reading.
I listened to this story as an audiobook and finished it in one day—it was that good! The book opens at a seemingly ordinary performance of King Lear, when the lead actor, Arthur, suddenly dies of a heart attack on stage. The next day, the world ends. This opening circumstance is not actually connected to the pandemic, but it serves as a kind of starting point. It is the moment when the various storylines of this book are all connected in some way. Although Arthur does not actually live to experience the apocalypse, he is the common link between the many tales being told in this novel. This method of storytelling, where characters’ lives converge and then spiral out again struck me as unique and attention-grabbing. The nonlinear structure Mandel employs allows this to unfold beautifully.
The structure of this story, however, was not my favorite part of this literary experience. What I liked most, and what will stay with me long after finishing it, is the heartwarming humanity that emanates from every word Mandel writes. Despite Mandel’s avoidance of grand representations of emotionality, pinpointing sentiment to short, concise turns of phrase and ideas creates a nuanced presentation of the human condition. For an end-of-the-world book, “Station 11” focuses on the simple details of everyday life to an unusual extent. A “Star Trek” quote one of the protagonists has tattooed on her arm seems to exemplify the main message of the book. It simply reads, “survival is insufficient.” At its core, this story is about the human ability and need to find joy and artistic interest in even the most bleak of circumstances. The various tales of this world illuminate the ways in which people ensure that even after civilization collapses, humanity will live on.
This takes two major forms. The first is a group of actors and musicians named the Traveling Symphony who move from place to place, using their nomadic lifestyle to bring performances of Shakespeare and other theatre pieces to those who remain. The Symphony notes that although they sometimes perform more modern plays, Shakespeare performances were, shockingly, the most popular. It seems the timeless nature of the playwright allowed for his works to be understood in a vastly different world from the one that you and I experience. It is also noted that Shakespeare lived through a plague and that the idea of plague itself shaped his works; perhaps, in an unprecedented present, reaching back to a familiar past is uniquely comforting. Either way, this storyline conveys the message that people need art to keep going, something I definitely connected with as an avid reader and theatre-goer. Most people can identify a time in their life when art was helpful to them emotionally, and this source of hope is what Mandel’s novel is describing the importance of.
Another instance of human perseverance in “Station 11” is when those living in an airport in the end-times create the “Museum of Civilization,” where they gather objects from their old lives that no longer have practical significance. In this way, the ordinary markers of life today have persisted in this world where nothing is the same. Some living in this post-apocalyptic world travel long distances to reach the airport. Even if they only hear about it through rumors, it is known as a place of sanctuary. This association between peace and reminiscence about the “old world” made me think differently about the daily objects I consider “normal” or do not even consider at all. The things we skim over, ignoring for their ordinariness, are what make us human.
This novel has received critical acclaim and was even turned into a limited television series. The story in the series, however, is very different from the book, as adaptations often are. It pushed some of the various storylines together by changing which characters spent the days of the apocalypse together as well as revealing some information earlier on. To me, this took away some of the magic of the novel, where entirely separate lives could weave together tangentially—a structure reminiscent of reality. There was, however, something pleasing about seeing characters you love not only come to life on the screen, but interact deeply with one another. So, while the show does not contain the same delicate elegance of the novel, it was interesting to watch.
`Reading this novel today, in the post-lockdown world, I obviously received it differently than a reader when the book was first released, in 2014. It seems like a haunting prophecy of the future from my perspective, but in an interview, Mandel challenges this idea, saying, “When you research the history of pandemics, as I did for ‘Station Eleven,’ what becomes really clear is that there will always be another pandemic.” This reality is part of what makes this book timeless. It acknowledges the eternal possibility of disaster while also maintaining that humanity is synonymous with hope.