About.com Rating

• Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel was released in September 2014
• Publisher: Knopf
• 352 pages

Do you find yourself thinking lately of the possibility of an ebola epidemic in the United States? One way to curtail excessive worry is to stop listening to or reading the news, but another is to read about something worse and comfort yourself with the resulting thought that at least it’s not that bad. If you’d like to give the second option a try, check out Emily St.

John Mandel’s new novel, Station Eleven, in which an unsuspecting airline passenger brings the deadly and airborne Georgian Flu to North America, which then wipes out 99% of the world’s population over the next few weeks, resulting in the collapse of modern human civilization. There is no shortage of dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature these days, but Station Eleven is a unique entry not to be overlooked.

Station Eleven is a riveting and timely novel. It’s the story of the end of the world as we know it, but no one feels fine. Most people are dead of a swine flu variation that has an incubation period of 1-2 hours and causes certain death within 1-2 days. No one who catches it survives, but there are some people who seem to be immune. It is these lost and forlorn folks who form small, isolated, primitive communities in the aftermath, spread too thin across the face of the earth to unite and pick up the pieces of civilization, to get power plants and lines of communication up and running, mine fossil fuels, maintain utilities, roads, and buildings, to form governments.

Communication and travel are impossible, lawlessness is everywhere, bizarre cults form. Against this backdrop, we follow several characters united by a common man, already dead, on their different and sometimes intersecting journeys spanning several decades before and after the collapse.

Arthur Levine is a famous actor in his fifties who dies of a heart attack onstage during a performance of King Lear in Toronto. That same evening, the Georgian Flu outbreak begins its swift and deadly course through Canada, which spreads impossibly quickly to the ends of the earth. Only two people in the theater that day survive the flu: Kirsten, a young actor, and Jeevan, an audience member who used to hang out outside Arthur’s house waiting to snap pictures of him and any of his three, now former, wives. In addition to what becomes of Kirsten and Jeevan, the storyline shows us the background and fates of two of these wives, one young son, and Arthur’s long-time friend Clark. With strong character development through flashbacks, readers will come to know and care about this group of survivors braving the new world.

Station Eleven is a gripping story that you won’t want to put down, but it’s more than that, too. It’s a story that calls its reader to the realization of what it means to live fully where you currently are, to not take the people and things of your life for granted, not knowing what you have until it’s gone. In the words of one of the characters, to not be a sleepwalker. It asks us to consider what survival means and whether that’s sufficient for humanity’s aim. And what is humanity’s aim, anyway?

While overall I enjoyed the story and themes of Station Eleven, there were several points that strained credulity - just how quickly utilities failed and the internet went out, for example. While this cast a bit of a shadow over the book for me, I still think it’s an excellent book and recommend it to all except the most paranoid and hypochondriac among us.