Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night, as Jeevan walks home from the theater, a terrible flu begins to spread. Hospitals are flooded and Jeevan and his brother barricade themselves inside an apartment, watching out the window as cars clog the highways, gunshots ring out, and life disintegrates around them.
Fifteen years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. Written on their caravan and tattooed on Kirsten’s arm is a line from Star Trek: “Because survival is insufficient.” But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.
Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
Review: One night, a production of King Lear doesn't go as planned. Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack on stage. Jeevan Chaudhary, a former paparazzo now EMT is watching in the audience and jumps to his aid. A child actress names Kirsten Raymonde watches Jeevan perform CPR in horror, but Arthur is dead. That night, as Jeevan walks him, a terrible flu is spreading. Jeevan barricades himself into his brother's apartment and watches from the windows as the world as they knew it fades away. Fifteen years later, and young Kirsten is grown and an actress with the Traveling Symphony. On foot, they move between settlements in this new version of the world, performing Shakespeare and music for small bands of survivors.
This was published in 2014, but reading it in 2026, it still feels hard to read after COVID. The flu in this story is much more catastrophic, with a vast majority of the world's population killed off in just a few days. But the scenes when people first hear that there is a terrible flu spreading and how it travels from one continent to another by plane are all giving COVID-19 pandemic. There is one scene where Jeevan goes into a grocery store and begins to panic buy cart after cart full of supplies that also echoes the events of 2020. This book is eerie and horrifying because it could happen and a lesser scale version of it has happened since this book was written.
It was also hard reading this not comparing it to scenes from The Walking Dead and The Last of Us television shows. The roads filled with abandoned cars, the small, isolated groups of survivors, the lawlessness, etc., all reminded me of other dystopian fictional realities. There are no monsters in this version though, beyond the people themselves.
I did love how art survives in this book. For the people in this new reality, it is not enough to merely survive. The idea of Shakespeare still being performed and instruments still being played was inspiring to me. Shakespeare plays a large part in this book. The different characters are all connected back to Arthur Leander, the actor who dies before the flu even wipes out the population. It feels like this was supposed to be the symbolic death of the kingdom and the end of the normal order of things as they knew it.
I listened to this on audio, which was challenging at times. This book jumps not only in time a good bit but also between different characters. I was able to follow it relatively well, but I worried that I was missing subtle connections or overlaps in different characters' stories that I might have noticed more immediately if I had read a physical copy. The audio narration was very well done, however.
I sometimes struggle with dystopian books with suspending my disbelief and at times this felt no different. Much of it felt realistic and honest and true to my own pandemic experiences with 2020. And I do believe some groups of survivors would go down dark paths like the group read by the prophet in this book. But I struggled to understand why post-flu they possess no technology or even electricity. Yes, the majority of humans would be killed. But someone with the knowledge would be there and if not trained, there would be a reference manual someone could use to jumpstart the electricity. Humans are ever resourceful and I just don't believe the new world order would mean total collapse of industrialized society; I think it would just transition to a much smaller scale until the world repopulated. I also didn't understand why they traveled around and seemed to live in mostly makeshift structures like the airport? There would be so many unoccupied houses left. Why wouldn't they just set up in a neighborhood together?
In the end, I felt like this was a bit aimless. It explores themes of survival, hope, the meaning of humanity, art, what gives us purpose, the reality of human nature, and the strange twists of fate. At first, I thought the prophet storyline would dominate the book. And it does shape much of it and lend a lot of tension, but it ends abruptly and is not the main thread of this novel in my mind. Instead, this seems to want to be a snapshot of life in an altered reality, surviving on against the odds. The ending did tie the different threads of the book up well.
Stars: 3.5
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