"Station Eleven" by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven is an poignant, moving and very human post-apocalyptic story told both before and after a devastating flu virus sweeps the world.

It’s an ensemble piece, with no one main character - it is told from the perspectives of a number of people, whose stories interweave before and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, and then follows their stories many years later.  At the beginning of the book, it isn’t clear what the purpose is of telling each person’s story - but the ways in which each character touches the lives of the others emerges organically as the the narrative artfully moves between each time and place.

According to the book blurb, the story revolves around a Hollywood actor who slumps over and dies during a production of King Lear, and 15 years later with “a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.”  While these things do happen, they are just the thread that binds together the various stories, rather than being the story itself.

As the pandemic started to take hold, the descriptions of the gradual collapse of civilisation are evocatively told and quite eery to read, given that it was written before COVID.  The hope that people had that it would all be over soon, and that civilisation would return, are tragic and moving.

Thankfully, this is not a gritty story of survival in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic.  The difficulties that the survivors must have gone through are hinted at, but the story moves forward to several years after the collapse of civilisation, where the survivors’ lives have reached some sense of stability.  The story does follow the “nomadic group of actors” mentioned in the blurb, and this is an elegant way for the story to move between various settlements, showing how people have coped in their own ways.

At heart, this is a story of humanity and hope.  As the various threads come together towards the end of the book, the thought that human community, endeavour, perseverance, and ingenuity will endure is ultimately an optimistic one.

My rating: ★★★★★