Famous actor Arthur Leander is starring as King Lear at Toronto's Elgin Theatre. During a crucial scene he begins to stumble. From the audience, Jeevan rushes to the stage to catch Leander as he falls. The curtain comes down while Jeevan begins CPR on the Hollywood star. At the same time, across town, emergency rooms are becoming flooded with patients, ill with a deadly strain of flu. In the next few hours the world will change irrevocably, as a worldwide pandemic wipes out almost the entire population leaving scattered pockets of survivors.
Station Eleven follows the lives of Leander, his ex-wives and child, a young co-star, a friend, the paramedic who tried to save him, and various other survivors of the pandemic. Non-linear, the story is told in switching timeframes - from decades before to twenty years after the world collapsed. We learn about how people adapted to a world without electricity, the internet and modern medicine.
There is so much I loved about this book. Parts of it were set in Cabbagetown - the area of Toronto where I grew up - so deep nostalgia crept in as Jeevan walked along Carlton Street, visited Allan Gardens and spoke of places from my childhood. The Travelling Symphony - a ragtag troupe of musicians and actors - that roam the territories to bring culture to the survivors. To my delight, their motto - 'Survival is Insufficient' - is taken from Star Trek Voyager. The way Miranda pours her heart into creating comic books which link together so many of the characters. The 'Museum of Civilisation' Clark creates, with its defunct technology, to preserve the past. The efforts of a librarian to record the memories of those he meets. All of these intriguing elements add to the richness of the story.
Mandel writes beautifully. She paces the story by packaging the chapters and altering the narrative style. The characters were well crafted and, through them, Mandel raises issues like the vacuity of celebrity culture, the role of technology, the desire to leave a legacy, and the burden of memory. While in the 'After' there were post-apcocalyptic hints of The Walking Dead and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Station Eleven presents a more hopeful view. Despite the bleakness and the devastating carnage of the virus, human empathy and morality will bring people together and the world can reinvent itself. Just the message we need at this time.
HBO has created a mini-series of Station Eleven which was filming as the pandemic began. I look forward to seeing it when it airs.