Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel

What better way to commence a period of enforced isolation, than reading a book set in a pandemic induced post-apocalyptic future. That was the thought running through my head in March when I alighted at Station Eleven. Judging by the rush to watch films like Contagion and Outbreak, I wasn’t alone in my Coronavirus navel gazing, let’s not judge ourselves too harshly though, we all had a lot of time on our hands.

Station Eleven is set in and around Toronto, the fictional pandemic is caused by a form of swine flu (pfft, swine flu, that was a doddle compared to covid) that spreads rapidly and kills quickly. Unlike (hopefully) our real life pandemic, the disease in Station Eleven is so virulent and deadly that it leads to the complete breakdown of civilisation. Within weeks, if not days, society begins to unravel as amenities become scarce, desperate for food people start to loot shops and homes. Before too long most of the survivors have abandoned cities, to remain in the city is to partake in a savage survival of the fittest, or at least, survival of the most ruthless. In other words, things are pretty messed up. Twenty years later, a relatively primitive civilisation has arisen from the devastation of the pandemic. Technology is at a pre-industrial revolution level and medical care is crude, the knowledge is still present but the means of implementing it is not. The world is sparsely populated, trust of strangers is non-existent and there is no form of organised government in place.

This is not a book in which the characters drive and shape events, rather they are swept along by them. The pandemic and subsequent collapse of society act as the backdrop against which we follow the stories of the major characters. The action switches intermittently between three time periods, and the author uses the variety of perspective and period combinations, to slowly unravel the long-term consequences of events, decisions and coincidences. Alongside these narrative changes, the tenor of the book also changes; at times, the writing is imbued with an ethereal, dreamlike quality, while at other times it is grittily realistic.

Station Eleven was a book that I enjoyed immensely, it’s fairly obvious from the start that this is one of those books in which the stories of seemingly disparate characters will converge at some point, what’s not obvious is how that will occur. The author does an excellent job of maintaining momentum, dropping little hints along the way to hook your interest, without revealing any more than necessary until the last few chapters.

I’d have enjoyed Station Eleven whenever I read it, it’s just an excellent book, but I do think that both its similarities to, and divergence from, life as we currently know it added to that enjoyment, realising that things could be a lot worse than they actually are brings a certain level of catharsis. One thing that did strike me quite hard is the level of prescience that the author displays for the reactions of the population in the early stages of the outbreak. Of course, the behaviours described in the book outstrip those seen in real life, as the consequences are much more severe, but the initial responses feel eerily similar to what we witnessed ourselves earlier this year.