Station Eleven Paperback – June 2, 2015

One cold night in Toronto, in the middle of a presentation of King Lear, Arthur Leandro dies on stage. Jeevan Chaudhary, a member of the audience and a paramedic, attempts to save his life. He meets Kirsten Raymonde, an eight-year-old cast-member. What none of them know is that this is the night that the Georgian Flu begins its death march across the human world. In two weeks, most the human race will be dead. Eventually 99.9% of the human race will be gone and the old civilization will be over.

The story picks up next with Kirsten now in her early twenties, walking with The Traveling Symphony - a collection of musicians and actors who stage plays for the small remnant communities that dot the region of Michigan and Toronto. They visit a community that has mutated in a strange way as it has come under the control of a religious fanatic. She has a pair of comic books featuring "Dr. Eleven" on "Station Eleven," which has a storyline about a space station/world that has carried the remnant of humanity into a dark and watery reality.

Then, the story skips back to follow Arthur Leadro's life, his development as an actor, his courtship of Miranda, who spends her life drawing the Station Eleven comics, and the disappointments he creates for himself. Then, it is back to the present of the post-apocalypse as Kirsten and her group deal with the threat of the religious fanatics. And, then, back to follow the story of what happens to Jeevan. And then forward to the present and the fate of a friend of Arthur's. And then back to the past, and further information that sheds light on the characters.

Some might not like the way this story is structured, but I liked the story. What I got was the sense of the world that the author was creating. As a reader who was not confined to a single point of view, I got a sense of the effect and experience of both the collapse of civilization and human life thereafter. Further, the returns to the past and the banalities of the life we take for granted - celebrities, movies, dinner parties, airplane flights, and the rest - creates a sense of melancholy for the world that is lost. This sense informs the scenes of the museum of civilization at the Severn City Airport, where passports and inoperable cell phones are put on display for the edification of people who remember life when they worked and for the younger generation who has no idea of what they are.

The story worked for me. I was drawn along with curiosity to see what developed. The prose was lovely. The characters were nicely developed, particularly that of Arthur Leandro, who, in fact, never makes it into the post-apocalyptic world that is the supposedly what this story is about. The mood and tone of the story are generally somber, but it all makes for a nice change from the frantic cliches of the endless crop of zombie apocalypses.

Many post-apocalyptic novels, especially those in which a massive reduction of the population stemmed from an outbreak of a virus, posit some sort of genetic change to parts of the remaining people, usually a condition characterized by crazed, flesh-eating zombies. There is none of that in this more realistic book, which takes place twenty years after a flu pandemic has brought an end to the old world. Certainly one sometimes encounters dangerous people, but they are just garden-variety unsavory characters, and one learns how to defend oneself and survive.

The story is told by people who are all connected in some way to Arthur Leander, a 51-year-old famous actor who died of a heart attack in Toronto while performing King Lear, just before the outbreak of the “Georgia Flu.”

The mise-en-scène beginning of the story is a microcosm of the book as a whole, which in some ways is a series of set-pieces featuring a traveling band of actors and musicians calling themselves “The Symphony.” At each town of any size they stop and entertain the public with concerts and theatrical performances. While they occasionally do other plays, people tend to prefer Shakespeare the most. “People want what was best about the world,” one of the group explains. Their motto, painted on one of their caravans, and taken from an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager” is “Survival is insufficient.” This is also the saying that the main protagonist, Kirsten Raymonde, has tattooed on her arm.

Kirsten was eight when the flu came, and at the time she was playing a bit part in Leander’s "King Lear" production. She had taken a liking to Leander, and he had given her some science fiction comics penned by his first ex-wife, called the “Station Eleven” series starring “Dr. Eleven,” a physicist who travels around on a space station after aliens took over the Earth. She still carries the comics with her everywhere. Kirsten remembers Arthur vividly, even though she can no longer even recall her own mother.

In alternating chapters, the author moves back and forth between the pre- and postapocalyptic times, and we learn more about Arthur’s life, and about the others who are featured in the book and who knew Arthur.

But this is more than a memoir and ode to a bygone way of life. When The Symphony comes to a town called St. Deborah by the Water, they discover the town is under the control of a religious cult leader calling himself The Prophet, who follows The Symphony after they leave with malicious intent. It is a new race for survival to see if members of The Symphony can reach a rumored haven in a former airport near the old city of Chicago before they are eliminated by this mysterious Prophet. The Airport is said not only to offer a safe place to live in peace, but something called The Museum of Civilization, where travelers have left artifacts of the former world - from credit cards to passports to laptops - so that the next generation can see what the world use to be.

When a showdown comes between Symphony member survivors and The Prophet, a large twist reveals how truly interconnected this pared-down world really is.

Discussion: This story is admirable for foregoing unreal elements that could steer the plot into silliness. I believe it is even supposed to be somewhat uplifting, with its glimpses of the dogged tenacity of nature manifested as the greenery and flowers that reclaim the spaces once overrun by concrete and steel, and of the perseverance of cultural excellence from the old world, such as classical music and Shakespeare. The author notes that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” often performed by the troupe, was written in 1594, the year London’s theaters reopened after two seasons of plague. Plague frequently closed Shakespeare’s theaters, and yet they consistently reopened, in one more way in which the threads of the plot interconnect. Nevertheless, I found the book bleak and depressing. It probably should be, given that it is “post-apocalyptic,” but it was also a bit too “theatrical” for me to get fully invested emotionally in the characters. By presenting the plot in “scenes” and dramatic interludes (echoing not only the plays but the panels of the Station Eleven comic books) rather than an organically evolving story, I felt more conscious of the “literariness” of the book than of being able to lose myself emotionally in the lives of the characters.

There is furthermore an overall tone of quiet and tranquility, which seems at odds with a post-pandemic struggle for survival. It suggests, rather, the dreamy, stage-play metaphor that permeates the prose. This was yet another aspect of the book that kept me distant from it.

Evaluation: In many ways this is an excellent novel, and was included on many “top ten books” lists for 2014. I agree it was very well done, even if, for me, the style tended to overwhelm the substance.