Leonard Gaya's Reviews > Station Eleven

Station Eleven is a rather difficult book to shelve in a given genre. It’s been marketed as post-apocalyptic science fiction (which it is!). Still, it doesn’t have the feel of a disaster novel: the cause of the fall of human civilisation as it is is an invisible one (a deadly pandemic), and the consequences are described from afar — far in the future, far in the distance, in the fantastic chapters that take place in a remote airport. St. John Mandel’s book does, however, bear some resemblance to Stephen King’s The Stand, but in a much shorter and bittersweet format.

The structure is that of a jigsaw puzzle, with scenes varying in place and time between a theatre where King Lear is being staged, a corporate office where a lonely executive assistant is drawing a series of S.F. graphic novels titled Station Eleven, an open range with a Shakespearean travelling troupe and a group of menacing zealots, an airport that is gradually turning into a museum, a newspaper interview...

What connects everything is, of course, Shakespeare and Station Eleven (the graphic novel within the novel), but more essentially the characters: Kirsten, Arthur, Clark (wink to Arthur Clarke?), Jeevan, Elizabeth, Tyler, Miranda (an obvious reference to The Tempest, and also an alter ego of the author within the novel)... Each one carries a specific point of view on the events that have ended civilisation. All of them, ultimately, are exiled, and all bear the same elegiac yearning for a world that has been lost. The world we live in now, the world we sometimes hate, our fragile world. All, in their own way, speak Dr Eleven’s words: “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth ”.