Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I'll admit it was a mistake to start reading Station Eleven just before bed--I found myself awake hours later, promising I would go straight to bed after a few more pages. Eventually exhaustion won out, but I was back at it the next morning, even before my first coffee finished brewing. This is an extraordinary novel: rich, beautiful, suspenseful and thought-provoking. Imagine, if you can, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead combined with The Road and just a pinch or two of Stephen King's The Stand tossed in for flavour.

Mandel starts with a fairly typical premise: almost all of humanity is wiped out by a super-flu, and the few ragged survivors must wander a desolate and dangerous planet trying to reestablish functioning and safe communities. Yet from this fairly predictable premise, she takes the post-apocalyptic-wasteland genre to an entirely new level.

The novel begins on a snowy night in Toronto: Arthur Leander, a famous actor, dies of a heart attack on stage while performing King Lear's mad-scene on the heath.  Leander is the anchor and focal point of the novel, even though he dies of non-Apocalyptic causes just before the pandemic hits.  The novel goes backward and forward in time, showing Leander's early life, rise to fame, his many failed marriages and following the key characters in his life into their bleak post-pandemic future.

Although she never minimizes the horror of the situation, Mandel avoids portraying the more gruesome elements of survival. Much of her timeline focuses on events before the pandemic or 15 to 20 years after. Although there are many references to the terrible violent events of the first year, she does not provide details.

Station Eleven not only examines the mechanics of survival and how the breakdown of society strips bare humanity's pretence of civilization, but also considers the meaning of art in a broken society, how objects can keep us connected to each other, and how we can still be moved by beauty even when surrounded by death.  Much of the novel is set in Year 20 and follows "The Travelling Symphony": a collection of musicians and actors who traverse from town to town performing classical music and Shakespeare's plays (thus my earlier R&G are Dead reference). Their motto is "Because survival is insufficient."

Mandel captures the complexity of her characters with wisdom and compassion, but never overlooks their weaknesses. Every character feels real and authentic, and by the end of the novel they populated my inner landscape like old and dear friends. And just as the characters feel real, the world she plunges them into is both plausible and terrifying. Throughout the novel every detail rings pitch perfect, from the description of a character walking through Allan Gardens on a snowy night to the internal rivalries of the musicians in the Symphony.

I would even recommend Station Eleven to those who don't usually enjoy dystopian fiction as it is a powerful affirmation of the redemptive powers of art and human connection and a deeply satisfying novel.

Five smileys out of five: 😀😀😀😀😀