Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

One night on stage in Toronto, famous actor Arthur Leander dies of a heart attack. The same evening, a deadly virus arrives in North America, spreading with unprecedented speed. Two decades later, a young actor who worked previously with Arthur is now a performer in the Travelling Symphony, performing Shakespeare whilst travelling a grand circle around Lake Michigan. When members of the Symphony disappear after visiting a town frightened by a figure known as "the prophet," events set in motion before and during the pandemic begin to converge.

Station Eleven was published in 2014 and has since been widely acclaimed, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel in 2015 and being adapted as a well-received HBO mini-series.

The novel is unusual, given that it employs standard post-apocalyptic fiction tropes without seeming to be hugely interested in indulging them. The post-apocalyptic sequences hint several times at a capability to go all Walking Dead, overwrought-but-entertaining melodrama with absurdly larger-than-life villains, but Mandel avoids that cliche; she likewise avoids the temptation to go fully-stripped-back minimalism like The Road. Instead the story circles between and lands on an idea the novel itself notes was lifted from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager written by Ronald D. Moore: "survival is insufficient." It is not merely enough to survive a massive, world-changing traumatic event, life afterwards has to be worth living, through friendships and the creation and enjoyment of art and stories.

As a result the focus of the story is on Arthur Leander, a deeply flawed man who can't make relationships work and enjoys the trappings of fame too much, but who also suffers from constant imposter syndrome and fearing he is not as good an actor as people say he is. Mandel tries to make him a sympathetic human through his immense flaws, though how successful that is will vary by reader. Even when Leander is not on the page - which is quite a lot of the book as he dies on the opening page - his decisions continue to have an impact on the people he knew, and the impact of their actions on others. I must admit that Leander wasn't a particularly compelling character to me and I'd have much rather followed the story of Miranda, the author of the titular Station Eleven comic book whose surviving issues have an impact on several people in the post-apocalyptic timeline, but her story gets relatively short shrift. Given she gets a cameo appearance in the author's subsequent book, The Glass Hotel, I wonder if the author agreed.

Because of the trifurcated narrative, the book sometimes feels more like an anthology than a novel. We have several episodes from Arthur's life, either done in flashback from his POV or various friends and contacts (like Miranda), and several from the pandemic itself ravaging the world. These sequences are horrifying and well-done, but Mandel seems unwilling to dwell on the apocalypse itself, more on the before and after. We then get further episodes in the post-apocalyptic storyline, with Kirsten in the Travelling Symphony, and another friend of Arthur's as he is marooned at a remote airport and helps turn it into a new township, possibly the first new one to emerge after the pandemic.

All of these dispersed story elements come together at the end in a manner that is thematically satisfying, but highly coincidental. Maybe if the characters were unaware of their connections to Arthur, this idea would have worked as a piece of irony, but the fact that multiple people with this connection to Arthur all run into one another in this location twenty years later and remark on it risks feeling contrived. The other complaint about the novel, that despite the apocalyptic backdrop featuring the destruction of civilisation as we know it, it ends up feeling slight, was for me not a major problem. The book not descending into cliched conflicts between disparate groups of survivors was a major plus for me. We've seen that too many times before.

Station Eleven (****) is a fine, restrained novel about the creation, propagation and enjoyment of art, which just happens to feature an apocalyptic event to make that point more loudly. Mandel's prose is elegant, her character skills are fine. At just 330 pages in paperback despite a multi-pronged narrative with a large number of POV characters and three different timelines, it even occasionally feels a bit rushed, as if Mandel developed more plot points than she'd perhaps originally envisaged exploring. Still, an interesting, concise and mature novel.

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