Because Survival is Insufficient

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel

If the world were to end tomorrow, what would you miss the most? The stereotypical teenage response might be the internet, cell phone, or computer, but there are so many other luxuries that society has normalized to the point where people think they deserve them that most people, once without, would find life much harder: professional haircuts, dessert, laundry detergent, air conditioners, same-day shipping, airplanes, swimming pools, cars, movies, concerts, medicine... and this is only "an incomplete list" (31).

Describing the plot of Station Eleven is a bit difficult; there are at least five different character viewpoints placed throughout the novel and two time periods that are twenty years apart. To be brief by way of the book, it's about a man named Arthur Leander, a celebrity actor who dies of a heart attack on stage while performing a production of Shakespeare's King Lear, playing the title character. The same night he dies, a plague known as the Georgia Flu begins to sweep over the entire world, killing billions of people within months. After the chaos dies down, several people who had known Arthur in some way manage to escape the crisis: Kirsten Raymonde, who played Arthur Leander's character's daughter in King Lear when she was eight years old; Jeevan Chaudhary, the ex-paparazzo who tried to save Arthur during his heart attack; and lastly, Clark Thompson, Arthur's best friend from before and after Arthur was wildly famous.

The story follows these three, post-apocalypse, in their respective journeys. Kirsten, in particular, joins a group called the Traveling Symphony as a teenager, who believe in keeping art alive even after everything has come to an end, "because survival is insufficient" (58). Jeevan, pre-apocalypse, had a dream of becoming an EMT after years of being a tabloid journalist and photographer; in order to keep the dream alive, he becomes an impromptu doctor in everyone's time of need and hones his skills for the twenty years after. In Clark's case, he lives with a group of people inside the Severn City airport in which he has stayed from the day he landed, almost a week after the imminent flu outbreak in North America. Since he is getting old and weaker, he has devoted the rest of his life to maintaining the "Museum of Civilization", which pays homage to the obsolete artifacts from before the Georgia Flu, including iPhones, laptops, stilettos, and a motorcycle.

However, don't let the whole 'post-apocalypse' description fool you; Station Eleven doesn't contain the action-packed life-or-death situations that you would expect that genre to have; instead, it explores the deeper meanings of being human and how civilization still lives on after it seemingly comes to an end.

Even though Station Eleven switches between time, setting, and point-of-view frequently, it manages to do so in a way that is concise and easy to follow. Much of the story's contents seem pointless at first, but it turns out to be very rewarding watching all of the elements start to come together, bit by bit. Nothing is put in without purpose, and finally getting to that aha! moment at the end made me feel like this book was worth it.

However, I do have my complaints, as always. The writing is absolutely fantastic, but I don't think it would hold the interest of the average teenager, which is part of the reason why it didn't make it past the first round of the Read-a-Thon. It's almost painfully poetic at times and a bit slow-going; there's little action and no teenaged characters. It's more suited for an adult, I think; I don't want to sound pretentious by saying that after I said I enjoyed it, but I do think I may have been able to relate to it more if I read it for the first time after going through some of the domestic struggles that Arthur & Co. go through in my late twenties or early thirties.

That being said, there's also the matter of character development; Kirsten, who's marketed as the story's main protagonist, which I very much beg to differ, has almost no depth to her whatsoever. She's broody and oh-so-clever, but it's never really clear what her goals are or how she changes emotionally throughout the story since she conveniently remembers nothing from before the first two years post-apocalypse. I prefer Jeevan and Clark to her; they were both adults when the plague arrived, so naturally, they remember how life used to be and it's clear how this turn of events affected them in the beginning and in the long run and that's portrayed beautifully.

All in all, of the three dystopian stories I read and wrote about this year (Ready Player One, Brave New World, and Station Eleven), Station Eleven wins first place by a close margin. Ready Player One was light and fun, and Brave New World was a good kind of creepy, but I think that Station Eleven has a much stronger message than the others at play: notice the things you have and don't take them for granted; for all you know, they could be gone tomorrow.

(A quote from one of the book's positive reviews that I liked, as a sidenote...
"A superb novel... [that] leaves us not fearful for the end of the world but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence." (San Francisco Chronicle) )