11 - Station Eleven

What seems like a lifetime ago, in 2012, I found myself living in small-town Germany. It was a year that involved a certain amount of travelling around on the country's surprisingly poor rail network - windswept hours spent huddling on platforms in the Ruhrgebiet's least interesting backwaters, endless empty stations on the route from Düsseldorf airport which were nevertheless deemed essential stops, flashbacks to fighting sleep on a painfully slow S-Bahn trip from Essen to Düsseldorf as the sun rose on a freezing December morning.

It was early on in my time there that I decided I should find some form of entertainment for said journeys. It was a different time, long before my Kindle, and when network operators charged extortionate per-kilobyte data use rates, a far cry from today's brave new world of no roaming charges whatsoever.

With this in mind, I happened upon a mobile app which was basically a database of plain text format copies of the internet's most popular horror stories. Over the course of the year I ended up reading them all - some very good, some which had potential but were under-developed, the vast majority forgettable or unoriginal, some just plain bad, and a few raising serious concerns over the author's mental state.

A lot of these stories imagined a post-apocalyptic world - post-society, post-humanity. It is a genre that has already been fairly well covered, and I don't think I once saw it done well. Partly due to the fact that there was no requirement for these writers to have any writing talent, but mostly because they tended to fall back on the tired tropes and stereotypes.

Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven is a book that does post-apocalyptic well. In fact, it does it brilliantly. More than just a step up from what has been done before, it combines detail in its setting, development for its characters, and a complex, interwoven plot that seems to swell and flow almost organically as the pieces fall into place around each other. It reminded me more than a little of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, jumping around in a manner that at first seems random, but makes more and more sense as the book goes on, and ultimately works from an aesthetic point of view as well.

Starting on the eve of a global health crisis that will go on to wipe out 99% of the world's population, the narrative introduces the novel's main characters as fate brings them together at a performance of King Lear in Toronto. Then, just as it seems things are getting going, we are taken twenty years into the future. What has happened cannot be reversed, the world has changed beyond recognition and what is left of humanity now do their best to survive with what is left. Mandel then proceeds to recap the character's story arcs in non-linear fashion, showing how their lives had always been connected and influenced each other. It helps that she does seem to care about her characters, and this means that by the end of the book so does the reader.

A mantra that keeps appearing in this new world is "survival is insufficient" - and it is here where Station Eleven is light years ahead of any post-apocalyptic fiction I have read in the past. From the Travelling Symphony that crosses the Great Lakes region performing orchestral music and Shakespeare plays to anyone who will watch, to the Museum of Civilisation that houses remnants of the old world in an airport, Mandel adds touches that show that the end of the world need not mean the end of optimism, or of culture, or of humanity. If I had to live in a fictional post-apocalypse, I would choose this one without hesitation.

5/5

Something, something, post-apocalyptic sci-fi rap. Seriously just watch all of this, it's basically the pinnacle of music.