Alison Flood 

Station Eleven review – Emily St John Mandel’s haunting dystopian vision

Emily St John Mandel creates a disturbingly believable vision of humanity all but wiped out by a flu pandemic, writes Alison Flood
  
  

King Lear, 1950. Artist: Goncharov, Andrei Dmitrievich (1903-1979)
Disturbing vision of dystopia. King Lear by Andrei Dmitrievich Goncharov (1950). Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

Station Eleven opens with a performance of King Lear in a Toronto theatre. Mid-sentence, the actor playing Lear falters, delivers the wrong line – “Down from the waist they are Centaurs” – and stumbles. In the audience is Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic, who realises something is wrong and climbs on to the stage. He’s too late: the actor, Arthur Leander, dies. That night in the bar the crew are raising a toast to him. Later we learn: “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

There is no shortage of post-apocalyptic thrillers on the shelves these days, but Canadian author Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven is unusually haunting. After most of humanity is wiped out by a flu pandemic – swiftly, brutally, largely off-stage – Mandel shifts the action to 20 years in the future, when Kirsten Raymonde, who as a girl played one of Lear’s daughters in the same production, is now part of a group of travelling Shakespearean actors, the Travelling Symphony.

While there are moments of violence, this time-shift means Mandel avoids dealing with the immediate, brutal aftermath of a global disaster: there is no The Road-style cannibalism or rape here. Instead, there is practicality: Jeevan, warned by a medic friend, stocks up on trolley-loads of essentials in a supermarket, “moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place”; mass graves at an airport are marked with airport tray tables jammed into the ground.

There is understated, piercing nostalgia. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below… no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment.” There is humour, amid the collapse, as the news channels switch off, one by one, and CBS switches “without comment” to reruns of America’s Got Talent, as “it’s the end of the world as we know it” circles endlessly in Jeevan’s head.

And there is Mandel’s marvellous creation, the Travelling Symphony, travelling from one scattered gathering of humanity to another, putting on Shakespeare plays, a quote daubed on to the first of its caravans: “Because survival is insufficient.” (“All I’m saying,” one of its members tells Kirsten, “is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek.”)

Mandel has previously published three intelligent, well received thrillers: Last Night in Montreal, The Singer’s Gun and The Lola Quartet. Station Eleven is a change of pace, but there is fear and danger in this new world, too, in the shape of a dangerous religious zealot known as “the prophet”. There is also a satisfyingly circular mystery, as Mandel unveils neatly, satisfyingly, the links between her disparate characters: wandering Kirsten, collecting old celebrity gossip clippings about the actor who died in front of her so many years earlier; Clark, the elderly British academic who holes up in an airport when disaster strikes; and Jeevan.

This is a disturbingly believable vision of dystopia, and of how the people in it not only survive, but live. “A deer crossed the road ahead and paused to look at them before it vanished into the trees. The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone… Perhaps soon humanity would simply flicker out, but Kirsten found this thought more peaceful than sad.” This book will stay with its readers much longer than more run-of-the-mill thrillers.

Station Eleven is published by Picador (£12.99). Click here to buy it for £10.39 with free UK p&p

 

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