Station Eleven (and, um. Hi.)

Well, that was an unscheduled hiatus.

Let’s get back to it, shall we?

(By ‘get back to it’ I mean posting at random intervals and vanishing for long periods without explanation. Mm’kay?)

When your jumper matches your book…

One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again.

Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened.

If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

Pretty much as soon as I started reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel it became clear that this was going to make it onto my favourites list. A gripping, multi-linear masterpiece about life after the end of the world, it’s a novel that is poetic, bittersweet and haunting in all of the best ways.

The narrative seamlessly weaves between characters, times and locations to piece together an expansive tale of a group of people, all connected by interactions big and small with a once famous actor called Arthur Leander – who might have been remembered most for his dramatic on-stage death had it not coincided with the night that the apocalypse began in earnest.

The ex-wife, the ex-best friend, the child actress and the former paparazzo turned paramedic who tried and failed to save his life populate Mandel’s beautiful and brutal world filled with Shakespeare and music in the form of the Travelling Symphony, a group of cut-throat actors and musicians walking what remains of North America performing for the people left; two issues of a comic called Dr. Eleven about a physicist who lives on a space station; a prophet – or, at least, a man who believes himself to be one; and the Museum of Civilisation in an airport at the end of the world.

It’s not very often while reading that I find myself thinking I really haven’t read anything quite like this before, but I was astounded by the uniqueness of Station Eleven throughout.

Mandel crafts moments of total beauty and frailty that constantly push up against abject horror – like the Museum of Civilisation, a beacon of hope, really, but within sight of an aeroplane that landed but never opened its doors. The people living at the Museum know that is filled with corpses, people killed by the same virus that took down most of the rest of the world. The question of what their last moments must have been – and whoever made the decision not to open the doors of the plane – hangs heavy over the entire enterprise.

At the same time though, far from a vision of the end of the world driven by the breakdown of decency – the idea that the loss of the basic structure of society would see the end of kindness and human decency – the end of the world Mandel paints is driven by community. From the Travelling Symphony to the Museum of Civilization, far from wanting to destroy the little of the world that’s left, Mandel’s characters want to come together, to build. At least, most of them do.

I’ve moved into a period of my life where I don’t make as much time for reading as I used to. I want to make more, but there are only so many hours in the day, so I’m trying not to beat myself up about it. In the moments I did make time – on trains, on those long Sundays where I had no plans – it was so easy to instantly lose myself in the world of Station Eleven. The past few months I’ve been finding that harder, too, to bury myself in an imaginary thing like I always used to. Reading Station Eleven was like reclaiming a quiet part of myself and I am so, so grateful for it.