Book #57 of 2015:
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Following in the tradition of George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides and Stephen King’s The Stand, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven spins a tale of our modern society collapsing and rebuilding itself in the wake of a calamitous plague that kills off much of the earth’s population. The novel follows a handful of people over the years both before and after the pandemic, gradually revealing how their lives intersect — sometimes in ways unbeknownst to the characters themselves.
Mandel paints a haunting picture of the fragility of our everyday lives, and she has clearly given a lot of thought to how the beginnings of a post-apocalyptic civilization might develop. Like Stewart, she draws very sharp distinctions between those who can recall the old ways and those to whom such things are but faint memories or even simply stories.
It is to Mandel’s credit as a storyteller herself that the sections of Station Eleven concerning a few more conventional lives well before the collapse are no less gripping than those about the Shakespearean troupe wandering across the new landscape. All in all this was an excellent novel, and I both look forward to a reread and hope for a sequel to further illuminate this setting.
★★★★★
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