K-SCORE: 74
Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Spoiler Level: Moderate
In Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel creates an elegant apocalypse. That’s probably the novel’s greatest asset. It’s a world where an easy-to-fathom disease kills 99% of the human population, scattering the survivors who don’t have the infrastructure to support the technologies of the modern world. For many of them, all they can do is sit back and watch the lights go out. In that, Mandel finds interesting insights into people and society.
“a thematic playground”
But it’s a story with far too many characters for its length. Even the (tentative) protagonist of Kirsten only has perhaps a hundred short pages of content where she shares the spotlight with others. There’s a crazy prophet trying to steal wives, an ex-boyfriend of Kirsten named Sayid, her best friend August, an older Symphony mate Dieter, the Symphony conductor who refuses to give her real name, a bunch of subsidiary Symphony characters named by their instrument and position like the tuba, the clarinet who doesn’t like Shakespeare, Viola, and so on, there’s the missing former Symphony members of Charlie and her husband and their baby Annabell, people in the towns they pass, a kid who ends up opposing the prophet, a guy who creates a newspaper and interviews Kirsten, many characters in the past most notably Arthur Leander, his three ex-wives Miranda, Elizabeth, and Lydia, all of the people Miranda worked with, Jeevan the wannabe paramedic, his ER doc friend Hua, his brother the disabled journalist Frank, later his wife and the people that live in his town, the farmer that comes with his wife when she gets shot, Clark and all of the people at the airport Clark lives with and comes to know like the French woman Annette, Dolores, Garret, and so on, and probably a few I’m forgetting like Tanya. All of them are squeezed into a novel that’s only maybe a hundred thousand words, if that. Mandel writers the characters well. The ones we do spend somewhat significant time with feel unique, real, and interesting like Miranda, Clark, and Kirsten, but the lack of focus makes the ensemble kind of a mess. Any moment has only a fraction of the power it could have because the reader doesn’t know a given character well enough to care a huge amount about what happens to him or her.
Station Eleven is a thematic playground, which is fine except perhaps Mandel is overestimating the amount of time a given reader (at least one Kyle Blackburn) will spend considering things like: what does it mean for Arthur to have died performing King Lear for him personally and for the doomed world? or what’s the significance of the paperweight of a stormcloud trapped in glass? or how does the fiction in the Station Eleven comic match up with the post-apocalyptic world? Yeah… I could answer those questions and it’s fun to think about a little bit, but mostly they’re intentionally ambiguous and of dubious importance.
“there’s something to be said for a young author willing to just tell a story without feeling compelled to take the reader on a rollercoaster ride of creative language”
The novel’s thesis is basically: because survival is insufficient, from Star Trek and though she supports it well, it doesn’t change much and I didn’t need convincing in the first place. I wrote in Sapphire, “There’s more to living than just not dying,” so obviously it’s something I’ve thought about already. But it was nice because I felt I could connect to the book on that level.
Mandel’s prose is impressive in its simplicity. She’s at her best when she’s calmly and easily describing a set of events and developments, especially right after the flu outbreak. She has a way of making something that should be purely expositional emotionally resonant. I kept catching reused words breaking the flow of sentences, which felt amateurish, but there’s something to be said for a young author willing to just tell a story without feeling compelled to take the reader on a rollercoaster ride of creative language.
So Station Eleven does a lot very well, which makes it worth reading, but it’s frustrating too. In addition to my LSD triangle of storytelling, stories fall somewhere on the spectrum of order and chaos and Station Eleven is very far down the chaos line. Mandel didn’t plot ahead of time. She didn’t know all her characters before she’d written chapters for some of them. She doesn’t have timelines or maps. Kirsten has a year’s worth of amnesia that’s never cured and I don’t even think Mandel knows what happened in that year. She bounces between timelines and perspectives recklessly, giving no character focus proportional to his or her importance. Station Eleven loosely (and admittedly poetically) explores an apocalyptic scenario, but doesn’t tell a single story or really all of a few stories, and it’s not the story of that apocalypse. She could have written just as easily for 50,000 words or 400,000 words. It’s like she stopped when she had a set of pages that would make a nice novel-shaped binding.
Which brings me to my final source of disappointment and irritation with it: it’s the kind of book designed to absorb praise like a sponge. It’s a National Book Award finalist, a Pen/Faulkner Award finalist, and it’s cover is covered with quotes from notable authors and critics calling it things that can’t be supported with evidence or rationally reconciled. Things like, “fearlessly imagined,” a book for, “the love lover,” and “leaves us not fearful for the end of the world, but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence.” What the fuck are you people talking about? This is a novel that has once-middle/upper class people in difficult situations, but it’s not that long, not that complicated, with simple prose, and very low stakes. The high stakes version of Station Eleven follows an engineer who thinks he can get the power back on somewhere or an epidemiologist fighting the virus or a survivalist who was truly ready and made more strides than anyone else towards restoring civilization. I liked the story of people living at the airport, don’t get me wrong, but come on - it’s a bunch of people living at the airport.
I will add that the quarantined Air Gradia jet was haunting and powerful and one of the best symbols I’ve come across anywhere, so tip-of-the-cap to Emily St. John Mandel for that. She’s a good writer. I just hope she’s not afraid to plan more and aim a little higher next time.