In roughly our time, after failing to save the life of an actor who collapses on stage, a trainee paramedic in Toronto receives a phone call from his doctor buddy at the hospital, telling him to lock himself in with some bottled water: a passenger from Russia has landed and is spreading a flu-like virus with a super-fast incubation period and nearly 100% transmission rate.
Twenty years later, civilization has collapsed. There is no electricity, no internal combustion engine, no modern medicine. In the Great Lakes region of North America, a group of actors and musicians walks along the abandoned road, bringing art and culture to the sparse settlements of survivors. Their motto is taken from Star Trek: Voyager: Survival is Insufficient.
I put off reading this book for a long, long time, and I lay the blame for that entirely at the feet of Cormac McCarthy. I read The Road not long after it came out, and it was GRIM. (I know he was carrying the fire, but all they do is say the words and not kill anyone, which isn’t what you would call uplifting. That book made me want to stockpile bullets.) Station Eleven is a different kettle of fish altogether. Essential to the telling of this story is the setting of the book after the period of initial mayhem, when all (or most) of the horror is in the past and some kind of stasis has been reached. By this mechanism, St John Mandel can construct a narrative in which people don’t necessarily trust one another, but also don’t shoot on sight. It’s an environment in which it’s possible to foresee a time when human culture will reconstruct itself. The Road was a single candle burning in a dark world; Station Eleven gives us many flames coming together to create the beginnings of a real fire.
The book also asks interesting questions about the resilience of art: for example, when they first began touring, the company performed a range of plays, but found that the works of Shakespeare were those most in demand. The narrator muses:
“Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theatres again and again, death flickering over the landscape.”
When the protagonist, Kristen, loots abandoned houses with her friend August, he searches for books of poetry (but also gazes lovingly at the televisions). Having spent twenty years walking, Kristen still weighs down her backpack with a paperweight she took with her the first day, a “smooth lump of glass with storm clouds in it, about the size of a plum”, just because she finds it beautiful.
We do get a few glimpses of what the first few years after the plague must have been like. One particularly strong image takes place in an airport where uninfected planes have been diverted. From inside the terminal, the refugees see another plane land and taxi to a stop, but no one gets off. Twenty years later, a village has developed in the building, but still no one has left the plane. The narrator never takes us inside the plane, but leaves us to imagine what scene might have unfolded. Similarly, while Kristen travelled on the road for a year in the aftermath of the epidemic with her older brother, she has no memory of what happened, and he never tells her.
I haven’t gone into the various plot threads that weave a number of main characters together, straddling both sides of zero hour and creating a sense of the continuity of humanity. This is a wonderful book, hauntingly uplifting considering the subject-matter.
Trigger warnings: rape, religious extremism, general violence.