If you’re a fan of Indie bookstores then you already know who Emily St. John Mandel is. We have mutual friends although I’ve never read her work before or spoken to her. A galley for Station Eleven was provided by a friend.
Her three previous novels, Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun and The Lola Quartet all were Indie Next picks. I can’t even imagine an alternative world that would not make Station Eleven an Indie Next pick. Will it be a science fiction and school library classic as soon as it is published? I wish we had a large blue lever at Three Guys that we could pull to alert every librarian when a perfect library book is published. I’m pulling that lever now.
Station Eleven is literary dystopian. It reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s forays into dark worlds. In Emily’s story a pandemic flu sweeps away a complacent world before the desperate situation is grasped. Everyone who catches the flu dies within several days and almost everyone catches it. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population is wiped out.
Mandel is a master of collapse. That’s a strange compliment to give a writer! I was morbidly fascinated by the collapse of my world. The writer moves artfully between time periods as the reader assembles a puzzle of what has happened to us.
I put “us” in italics because Emily’s preternatural empathy for her characters makes you feel like you are one of them. That’s a fine compliment for a writer, isn’t it? “I started your story as a reader but then I became a character you were writing about. I entered the book.”
That’s especially true of the performers of the Traveling Symphony. After the Year One (the calendar has been restarted) the world we’re presented consists of a collection of small hamlets, created ad hoc out of former gas stations, motels and my favorite (!), an airport.
The Traveling Symphony is a collection of musicians and actors who journey by horse-drawn caravans (maybe called trailers to you) performing mostly Shakespeare and classical music. These are dangerous and uncertain journeys. Every player is armed and a survivalist. And if your trek varies from an accustomed itinerary that you know is safe, you might encounter anything.
But fascinating, it’s like watching Christians being devoured by lions in the Coliseum, Mandel also timeshifts before The Collapse to our own world and employs such phrases as, “fifteen days before the collapse” “a year before the collapse” and then seems to write a novel that’s contemporary fiction about characters of which most, you know, will die in the pandemic.
Poignant also. I remember the beautiful young woman, standing in the wings of a theater in Toronto during a performance of King Lear, who Mandel remarks will be dead in a week. Writers are gods.
Try to explain electricity to someone who has never experienced it. Or explain that water once came out of a tap. Or that there was an “internet” that connected everyone and on which you could find out anything, or that cool air could come out of a vent. Or chillingly, that people could get their meds.
In this dystopia cell phones and credit cards are exhibits in a museum and all laptop and television screens are blank. Children born after the collapse find it hard to believe in these wonders, or that the huge passenger jets in airports could have ever gotten off the ground. Mandel takes every technical component of modern life and then imagines: “You don’t have that anymore”. The past becomes the fantastical future that we dream of and look forward to. Futurism looks backwards.
Then after the Shakespeare and Beethoven of the Traveling Symphony and characters slaughtered by crossbows and daggers on lonely highways, a character quotes Seven of Nine from Star Trek Voyager and says: “Survival is insufficient.” I was blown away. Emily St. John Mandel destroys our world so that we can reimagine it as a lost utopia. Like I said, writers are gods.
