Station Eleven (2014)
Four Stars out of Five
Emily St. John Mandel
Ionesco published a play in 1961 about conformity and mass
movements, “Rhinoceros”. In his play set in a small town in France, the town
drunkard, Berenger watches in amazement and disgust as his fellow townspeople
transform into Rhinoceroses. Berenger has multiple arguments with his friends
prior to each transforming. His friends make the argument that Humanism is dead
and is time for the Rhino. Ionesco was making an argument about conformity, but
I heard a different argument: that many people, frustrated and confused by
modern life would choose a simpler life if they could. I think that at the root
of the current wave of apocalyptic movies and books such as “The Walking Dead”, “The
Last Ship”, “Road Warrior”, “The Hunger Games”, etc. (the list is endless),
there is a subtext that argues for a return to a pre-industrial world. A world
where the average person understands the most advanced technology around him
(e.g. fixing a wooden fence). But what would really be lost in some kind of
apocalyptic end to civilization? In Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 book, “Station
Eleven”, we get one aspect of such losses.
“Station Eleven” begins with Arthur Leander acting the role
of King Lear in a Toronto theater. During his performance we are introduced to eight
year old Kirsten Raymonde, a child actress in the play with Arthur. Arthur
suffers a heart attack during the play, and shortly thereafter the world is
plunged (quite literally) into darkness as a bad case of influenza sickens and
kills over 99% of humanity. The book jumps forward twenty years where re-meet
Kirsten, now a young woman – a very hardened young woman. She remains an
actress (as well as fierce warrior) in a band of artists called the Travelling
Symphony. This symphony is a mixture of Shakespearean actors and musicians.
They move along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan within former automobiles
drawn by horses. They encounter a rough crowd in a small village known as St.
Deborah’s by the Water. The townspeople are led by an individual known as the
Prophet. Fleeing St. Deborah’s by the Water, the symphony heads towards a
former airport in Severn City.
Mandel does a very skillful job of moving back and forward
in time from the early days of Arthur’s acting career, through his three
marriages, to his King Lear performance in Toronto, and finally to various time
frames in the post-flu era. In the process of doing so, Mandel weaves several
themes from Shakespeare’s time of plague, elements from King Lear and more
importantly to a graphic novel written and illustrated by Arthur’s first wife,
Miranda. The graphic novel is the source of the book’s title of “Station Eleven”.
Within this graphic novel, there is a futuristic view of the world as seen
through the eyes of the novel’s protagonist, Dr. Eleven. He governs a mobile worldlet
(Station Eleven) that has suffered its own apocalypse. His decisions and
worldview have condemned the other inhabitants to a life away from Earth and as
it develops a world beneath the waves on their moon-sized satellite. The people
that live beneath the water (unlike Dr. Eleven who lives on one of the few
islands) strain and rebel at their situation.
The intended parallels of Station Eleven’s Undersea denizens
and those of the post-flu world where Kirstin lives are not hard to find. Like
my allusion above, the people of Undersea want only to go back to what they
once had. Even though they fled the Earth due to an alien invasion, and even
though to return to Earth would require untold sacrifices, they will accept
those sacrifices, if only they can return to the home they once knew. In
Kirsten’s world, many of the villages she and the Travelling Symphony pass
through, also have made this choice. They will not tell the new generation of
the things they once had (cell phones, etc.), but rather they have chosen in
this new (old) world of no technology, no medicine, no nations, and no vision
of the future; only instead a vision of the present, which actually is a view
to the past.
There are exceptions in Kirsten’s world, and Severn City
Airport is one such exception. Here is a Museum of Civilization. This museum is
a collection of those very same cell phones, PCs, high heel shoes and so forth.
Indeed, right outside the museum’s walls is a collection of the jet airplanes
that flew into the airport even as civilization was crumbling. In an oft-used
technique by Mandel of coincidence, the Museum is run by Arthur’s best friend,
Clark. There are many other coincidences throughout the book, some of which are
used to create a few dramatic mysteries. None of the mysteries are very (or
even a little hard) to penetrate by the reader. They add little to the story,
but they are minor distractions. What does add to the story is Mandel’s use of
an extremely nostalgic recitation of the Things We Have Lost. Rarely have I
read or viewed a story wherein the various artifacts of modern life that would
be lost during a civilization-ending event have been discussed in a more
poignant manner. There is little poignancy otherwise within this book, but the
almost Ray Bradburian fashion that Mandel uses to describe a loss of the future
(in stark contrast to those mourning the loss of the past) is the book’s most
notable feature.
There are parallels to the story’s impact on human life that
mirror the impact of the Black Plague on Shakespeare’s time. Like the mordant
tone of King Lear, the human suffering, its’ sense of regret and madness,
Kirsten’s world has its share of those that regret the loss of the future and
those that choose madness as an escape. Thus both Shakespeare’s world and his
play offer examples of life in Kirsten’s world; in the same manner, the “fiction”
within Kirsten’s world of the graphic novel acts rather like King Lear – that is
the reality of Kirsten’s world and the fiction of Station Eleven all line up.
There is suffering, there is regret, and there is a sense of world’s end. The
big difference is that in Shakespeare’s time, you could kill off two-thirds of
Europe and not destroy civilization. Whereas, in Kirsten’s (and our) world, if
you kill off a sufficient number of people, the people that provide the
knowledge and experience of a highly technological civilization, then you lose
that civilization. You lose it so bad, it may be unrecoverable. That Mandel
gives a glimmer of hope at the book’s end, suggests she may of two minds on the
subject of technological civilizations.
But I think her main point is embodied in the epigram at the
book’s ending (see below). It seems clear to me that she is suggesting that she
too votes for the past. I vote for the future, for medicine, for cell phones
and jet airplanes, and for a sense that the future is better, not worse than
the past. More complicated, yes, but better, and for me that is the key. Despite
my opposing worldview, Mandel’s book is one worth reading; if only to get an
opposing point of view.
The bright side of the
planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are
falling asleep, each in its hour,
And for me, now as
then, it is too much.
There is too much
world.
-Czeslaw Milosz
The Separate Notebooks
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