Station Eleven might well be the book for readers who gave up on The Road because the post-apocalyptic world Cormac McCarthy painted was so austere they couldn’t see past the misery to engage with the issues this fabulous novel raised.

Emily St. John Mandel’s apocalypse is a flu pandemic that wipes out most of the people and systems from the face of the globe. Her tale narrows the focus to a small band of Canadian survivors—most connected in some way with an actor called Arthur Leander who died on stage just two weeks before the flu hit.

Their struggle to stay alive is detailed—but not exhaustively. They talk of threats, and certainly stockpile food and raid houses, but there are few actual confrontations.

I think this frees Mandel to focus on flashbacks that interrogate the world that was—with all its banalities, beauties, ironies, virtual realities and disappointments—and she has done this superbly.

Mandel’s characters with their yearnings, sorrows and recollections drew me in and, as their paths intersected and glanced away again, I really wanted to know where each of them would end up.

Arthur Leander is a man whose regrets crowd around him ‘like moths to a light’, and who decides that ‘the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, is the sheer volume of regret’.

Kirsten Raymonde is eight when the flu hits. She is a long-term survivor who has little memory of her first few years in the new world but carries a ziplock bag of clippings about Leander (whom she saw die on stage).

Arthur’s wife (and later ex-wife) Miranda creates a graphic novel featuring Dr Eleven who lives on Station Eleven. She also finds meaning in her work as an executive for a shipping company and whispers, ‘“I repent nothing” into the mirrors of a hundred hotel rooms from London to Singapore’.

Arthur’s friend Clark conducts 360˚ assessments on flailing executives to try to bring them up to speed. He interviews a young woman about her boss and she tells him the corporate world is ‘full of ghosts’. By this she means people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and are disappointed though they may not know it.

‘You probably encounter people like him all the time,’ she says. ‘High-functioning sleepwalkers, essentially.’

Station Eleven asks some elemental questions: If the world ended tomorrow, what would your life mean? Are you doing what you love or are you trapped? Would a different world allow you more freedom or entrap you differently? What is the function of memory: Does it inure you to reality or deepen your experience of it?

I keep pondering what Miranda says to Elizabeth after Elizabeth has stolen Arthur from her, ‘No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.’

‘Survival is insufficient’ is one of Kirsten’s tattoos—a text taken from a ‘Star Trek: Voyager’ episode—and I agree there should be more to life than hand-to-mouth. Station Eleven also made me think again that, in a world where so many people are barely surviving, shouldn’t the people for whom survival is insufficient be working to change the perceived order of whose survival matters most?

Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
Pan Macmillan Australia, $29.99

July is Microlit month over at Spineless Wonders Publishing #‎MicrolitMonth and I’m traveling—so all my posts this month are meant to be short and sweet (250 words max)—except when it’s easier to exceed these limits as I have in this post!