Words&Dirt

Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a stirring, nearly-flawless novel that breathes new life into the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction. When a hyper-aggressive strain of the flu kills more than 99 percent of the world’s population, Earth’s few survivors must decide how to live in a crumbling world. It’s a typical setup for this kind of story, but Mandel’s version of the end of the world is far from familiar. By favoring human relationships and minute details over global conflicts and turgid action sequences, Mandel concocts an anti-blockbuster that chills the nerves, teases the intellect, and warms the heart.

Station Eleven interweaves the stories of a loosely-associated group of characters, jumping back and forth in time to present their lives before and after the flu epidemic and civilization’s subsequent collapse. It’s an effective pacing method that doles out information in parsimonious but loving portions. The book overflows with thoughtful questions about what it means to be human, both in the contemporary modern world and Mandel’s post-apocalyptic future. The book’s greatest strength is its unwillingness to draw firm conclusions about which world is better. Mandel prefers the deeper question of how people can learn to live with themselves and others in whatever world they happen to inhabit.

Mandel is a tremendously gifted writer and storyteller. Her prose is an unhurried blend of modern and 19th-century styles, with sentences often sprawling beyond their initial intimations. Her descriptions brim with vivid images that often linger in the reader’s mind. While Mandel’s language is occasionally overwrought, and the narrative stalls momentarily leading up to the conclusion, these minor flaws detract only slightly from this otherwise riveting tale.

Station Eleven is a bittersweet love letter to modernity that reflects an ambiguous attitude about the interpersonal consequences of advanced technology. As shown by the following passages, Mandel is enamored with technologized life without being entirely uncritical of it:

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars. (32)

Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. (178)

Mandel contrasts these lamentations with poignant descriptions of “this world where almost everyone was gone” (148). Two decades after the collapse, Earth feels wilder, and humans once again see themselves as inhabitants, rather than masters, of the natural world. Survivors wonder inconclusively whether it is preferable to be old enough to remember anything about the old world, or to be born after the collapse and never miss it. It’s a less comfortable and secure existence, but not one bereft of dignity, mystery, and love.

Another critical element of Station Eleven is its sedulous examination of the relationship between humans and objects. Throughout the novel, certain objects contribute to each character’s identity formation; the changing availability and functionality of these objects forms a thematic bridge between Mandel’s pre- and post-apocalyptic landscapes. The question on Mandel’s mind seems to be: What do our modern objects say about us, and what would we say about them, especially if they were no longer ubiquitous? One character explores the question by establishing a Museum of Civilization:

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyor belt somewhere in China. (255)

As objects pass between different characters and travel through time, they gain new meanings. In a clever metafictive twist, we discover that Station Eleven’s title refers to a fictional comic book series created by one of the characters. These comic books later influence two other characters in radically divergent ways, highlighting how individual circumstance and temperament affect narrative interpretation. While Mandel generally seems more interested in exploring moral ambiguity than passing judgment, she also goes out of her way to reject the insidious suggestion that “everything happens for a reason.” Only fools and fanatics mistake good fortune for moral vindication.

Though dressed up as a doomsday narrative, Station Eleven is actually a story about the choices we make, or fail to make, and what it takes to bring ourselves a little closer to the person we truly long to be. One character reflects on years wasted:

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. He had done some things he wasn’t proud of…He’d spent his entire life chasing after something, money or fame or immorality or all of the above…How many friendships had he neglected until they’d faded out? (327)

In the absence of expression, our loved ones can never know how profoundly they animate our internal lives. The needle of tragedy piercing Station Eleven is its depiction of people who think about each other much more than they reach out. Cut off by circumstance, laziness, and fear, Mandel’s characters fail to truly understand what they’ve meant to one another. This truth is reserved for the reader alone, and comes with a plangent imperative to make good on every opportunity to let others know they are loved.

It’s never too late to make amends or honor past affections, but we cannot afford to wait another instant. Even if we resolve to start anew tomorrow, the world may have other plans.

Rating: 9/10