August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes, there had to be one where there had been no pandemic and he’d grown up to be a physicist as planned, or one where there had been a pandemic but the virus had had a subtly different genetic structure, some minuscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted. -- Station Eleven
What better book to read in the midst of a global pandemic that has, at the time of this writing, infected millions and killed hundreds of thousands? Mandel, in her post-global pandemic world has written a work that stands at the top tier of literary end-times along with two of my personal favorites from recent years, Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake, 2003) and Cormac McCarthy (The Road, 2006) as well as classic, less apocalyptic books, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) by Daniel Defoe (see review) and The Plague by Albert Camus (1947). As a side note, Station Eleven is also an upcoming timely Netflix series.
The literary world has been busy at this time compiling and curating list of plague works, many of which include Mandel’s Station Eleven; here are a few of those lists:
Pandemics: An Essential Reading List by Tobias Carroll (10 March 2020)
12 Books About Pandemics by Electric Lit (10 March 2020)
The 16 Best Pandemic Books, Fiction and Non-Fiction by Sarah S. Davis (30 July 2020)
Epidemic! Fictional Plagues and Pandemics by ChiPubLib_Adults
Pandemic Books by Goodreads
Turning back to Station Eleven, the pandemic that serves as the basis for the plot is eerily like the current COVID-19 pandemic. In the novel, the pandemic arrives in Toronto via a passenger plane coming from the Republic of Georgia. The resulting “Georgia Flu” quickly infects the entire world, quickly killing billions of people and leaving small bands of humans. Station Eleven is the story of some of those survivors (and their descendants) spread across the Great Lakes region of North America.
Mandel’s story is told across time, moving between pre-pandemic times, the Year 0 of the start of the pandemic, and the current time. Mandel builds her work around the life (and death) of Arthur Leander, an actor in perhaps the end time of his career, now a successful Shakespearean actor playing the role of King Lear. Key to the story is Kirsten Raymonde, a minor player in Leander’s Lear, but the center around which the novel turns.
All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient. -- Station Eleven
Raymonde’s life as a young woman and a member of The Travelling Symphony (a troupe of players and musicians who traverse the Great Lakes region performing Shakespeare’s plays and playing music) is the center of the novel’s present.
Much more description of the plot or characters would reveal too much of the complex and intertwined nature of Mandel’s work. Station Eleven builds on the tropes of the genre. Mandel’s development of character is excellent and she writes compelling dialog. She juggles a complex plot well and true to the genre, riffs on the exchange between two of her characters:
“It just doesn’t make sense,” Elizabeth insisted. “Are we supposed to believe that civilization has just come to an end?”
“Well,” Clark offered, “it was always a little fragile, wouldn’t you say?” -- Station Eleven
Mandel recently released her latest novel, The Glass Hotel (2020) that has received excellent reviews.
Read: July 19, 2020 | Buy on Kindle
See my complete 2020 Reading list on Goodreads.
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