Station Eleven
“May you live in interesting times,” that apocryphal but durable “Chinese” curse, has always seemed like a foregone conclusion. In any age there is bound to be plenty going on that qualifies as interesting — that is, terrifying, dispiriting, and despair-inducing. Some of the more “interesting” phenomena commanding our attention right now are Russia’s belligerence; the alarmingly rapid rise of ISIS; earthquakes in Northern California; the portentous rumblings of an Icelandic volcano; and the resurgence of Ebola in Africa. It is this final item — and the resulting worries about how it could be spread via air travel — that makes Emily St. John Mandel’s end-of-days novel Station Eleven so grimly captivating. The disease in her scenario, a sort of aggressive flu, is short on horror movie symptoms, but the miracle of flight allows it to work quickly and to leave vanishingly few survivors.
Mandel, the author of three previous novels, has in Station Eleven borrowed a conceit from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). Bergman’s great film follows a knight and a troupe of actors through Sweden at the time of the Black Death; Mandel’s book follows a traveling Shakespeare company through the Upper Midwest in the aftermath of a flu pandemic that has brought the world close to an end. That is where the similarities end, and it would be a mistake to call Station Eleven an homage, let alone a rip-off, of the film. Whereas The Seventh Seal treats the meaning of death in God’s seeming absence, Station Eleven grapples with the meaning of life, creativity, and fame in the absence of a civilization to witness or nurture human achievement.
The book opens at a performance of King Lear in Toronto, just as the great pandemic is beginning but before any but medical professionals are aware of it. Arthur Leander, the famous actor portraying Lear, has a heart attack onstage; Jeevan Chaudhary, an EMT-in-training, leaps from the audience and tries unsuccessfully to revive him. This is a potent symbol of the doomed project of preservation — of order, sanity, and meaning — that occupies Station Eleven‘s characters. And it is shortly after this episode that Mandel retails a litany of things lost to the global disaster: “No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. . . . No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand. . . . No more flight. No more countries, all borders unmanned.” This unsettling catalogue goes on for two pages and concludes with a grim double entendre about the unmasking of our native potential for barbarism: “No more avatars.”
The story picks up again in the former United States, “twenty years after the end of air travel.” Kirsten Raymonde, who had been backstage — as a child actress — the night of Arthur’s death, roams the ravaged midwestern countryside with the Traveling Symphony, performing King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One suspects that this ragtag troupe performs as much to make itself indispensable, and thus slightly safer from depredation, as to keep the lights of civilized culture flickering. Dangers abound. There are many tropes familiar from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as well as the Walking Dead graphic novels and television show: roving bands of marauders and “ferals,”infighting and politicking among the struggling remnant. Daily life is about making it to the next flimsy outpost.
Interwoven with this narrative is the tale of one of the first groups of survivors — including Arthur’s best friend, one of his ex-wives, and his young son — trapped in a quarantined airport. (The quarantine lapses when there is no one left to enforce it, but the group is still trapped in every meaningful sense.) Food court stores and snack kiosks are emptied out; luggage is rifled for medication; devices run out of batteries; credit cards are discarded as it becomes clear that they will never mean anything again. The contingency and fragility of life as we know it stand in increasingly depressing relief. Planes take on a great significance. As a character says elsewhere in the book, “If I ever saw an airplane, that meant that somewhere planes still took off. For a whole decade after the pandemic, I kept looking at the sky.”
This “looking at the sky” is pointedly not a nod to the religious or spiritual impulse. The things the characters in Station Eleven long for are squarely of this world, or at least what this world used to be. (Kirsten, after ransacking an abandoned house: “That’s what it would have been like . . . living in a house. You would leave and lock the door behind you, and all through the day you would carry a key.”) There is nothing like genuine religious feeling among the survivors, though — perhaps a bit too predictably — there is plenty of the counterfeit kind. The villain of Station Eleven, or at least of the narrative thread involving the adult Kirsten, is a sinister Prophet leading his cultish followers in rapine and violence. When the Prophet’s origin story is revealed, so too is Station Eleven‘s weak grasp of the outsize role that the transcendent would play in a ruined civilization.
Instead of the transcendent, the search for meaning in the face of our sure annihilation, we get fame. Arthur Leander, the deceased actor, is the linchpin of Station Eleven. The third of the book’s interwoven narratives recounts his rise to celebrity, his succession of wives, and the pleasures and perils of celebrity. What human need does celebrity satisfy, and is it a lasting satisfaction? These questions are encoded in the very structure of Station Eleven, its shifts of time and place focusing the reader’s thoughts on the power of memory and nostalgia, the desire for something that doesn’t pass away.
A stoic sort of longing imbues every page. One character founds a makeshift Museum of Civilization at the airport, where the doomed may examine such relics as smartphones and fancy shoes. Another founds a rudimentary newspaper, in which the annals of the crumbling world may be recorded. Kirsten covets tabloid articles about Leander, her dimly remembered friend, and pages of Station Eleven, the graphic novel by Arthur’s ex-wife Miranda, about space travelers searching for home. Fame in Mandel’s novel is not crude celebrity as we understand it, but the deeper kind of perdurability inherent in all great art and human endeavor. As the words on the Traveling Symphony’s caravan — a motto remembered from an old Star Trek episode — go: Survival is insufficient. The goal is not merely to survive but to live on in the memories of others.