Book Review: Station Eleven
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Station Eleven is a book about a deadly plague that comes very close to wiping out humanity altogether. It focuses around Arthur Leander, an actor from Canada. The book jumps around in time quite a bit, examining events in Arthur’s life before the plague, and following a whole cast of characters with a variety of connections to Arthur after the plague.
The pretext for the book is pretty compelling, not to mention more than a little uncomfortable in a pandemic world. It was rather prophetic a few years ago; now it’s downright squeamish! It’s not clear that the virological foundation of the book is all that sound - hyper-contagious and hyper-deadly viruses are actually at something of a disadvantage compared to those with a longer incubation period - but that is hardly relevant to anyone reading the book. The idea that the vast majority of humanity could be wiped out via a gruesome, unseen, and essentially unstoppable enemy feels real enough - even if it’s not going to get through peer review.
At a fundamental level this book makes us think about what we value in civilization and why we care about the society we live in. Very relatedly - what is the purpose of life? Many people orient their lives around some variation of social justice, the notion that we can create a more just society in the future than the one we were born into. What if the idea that society will continue throughout our lifetime is essentially just a convenient myth? Why bother with social justice, or indeed any program of progress? There are a variety of post-dystopian fictions that tackle these questions - this one reminds me most closely of The Road, though I tend to avoid the genre so there may well be others. Against this bleak background, there is, toward the end, some kind of nod towards hope. Though it’s something of an interesting one, and the author’s basic answer to all these vexing questions seems to be something like this: “neighborliness joined to material comforts will ultimately vanquish ideology.” Strange conclusion, and the road toward it is pretty grim!
Adorning this somewhat unusual thought is a complicated web of stories which center around one man, the actor Arthur Leander. I pictured him as Donald Sutherland, specifically as he portrayed President Snow in the Hunger Games. Probably, the fact that both of them are Canadians playing national rulers is what cemented the image - and who knows? Perhaps that’s what the author had in mind as she was sketching out the book, since the movies preceded Station Eleven by a couple of years.
In any case, there were a few themes related to Arthur that, if I’m being honest, simply did not make sense to me. His last name is very probably a reference to the tale of Hero and Leander in Greek myth, but there are really no elements in this book which seem to resonate with that story - aside perhaps from the concept of beacons, which appear here and there. Maybe more obviously, he’s a man named Arthur who’s acting as an English king on the dawn of the pandemic that will crush humanity. Shouldn’t he be thought of as some kind of Arthurian figure, and wouldn’t it make sense for the book to mirror in some way the Malorian tale of the fall of Camelot? Sure it would make sense, but that’s not remotely the idea here.
There’s a scene, perhaps three-quarters of the way through the book, where Arthur argues with his director about some witty piece of stagecraft in King Lear: the director wants King Lear standing atop a balcony as the audience files in. Why? Asks Arthur. Isn’t that just… awkward? Not particularly coherent with the rest of the play? Sure, says the director, but figure out why he’d be there. The book as a whole is a little like this play: why does this particular paparazzo make it when so many others don’t? What makes Arthur’s son such a particularly weird kid? Why would a troupe of actors in the post-apocalyptic Great Lakes region travel from one town to another rather than stay put? Well, you just sort of figure it out.
I’m making something of an odd complaint, given that the story is so fascinating and the writing so engaging; given that the particularly gruesome details seem to unfold slowly and with devestating effect over the course of the book, rather than all at once; given that the self-referential, eponymous comic book which ties nearly all the characters together is so bizarre yet somehow apt. But I think that the arbitrariness of the plot is, in some odd way, the point of it all.
Kristen, who is one of the major characters, has no proper role in King Lear. She is eight years old when she meets Arthur Leander, and there are no children in that play. In other words, she really should not have ever met the great actor, she really should not have inherited his ex-wife’s comic book, and in all probability she probably should not have survived the plague and helped to vanquish the one character in this book who is most unambiguously evil. That’s what the plague is like, Mandel seems to say: kind of arbitrary and without reason! Yet at the same time, the plague does produce a glimmer of hope. Just as the bubonic plague produced, as it were, the works of Shakespeare.
I’m confident that I’m missing something rather brilliant about this work. I’m also confident that reading it during the pandemic has been at least a little bit tramautic. I still enjoyed it.