Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
Twenty years after apocalypse by flu, a Shakespeare troupe and symphony tours a depopulated America, living by the words painted on their caravan, “because survival is insufficient.” This story is intercut with flashback to before and during the epidemic, centered around a web of characters and events which coalesce around an actor, Arthur, who drops dead of a heart attack while playing King Lear.
This is a wonderful concept, especially the post-apocalyptic traveling theatre company, and the novel largely though not entirely does it justice. Post-apocalyptic novels can be roughly divided into those that argue that the structure of current society is all that keeps us from becoming cannibal rapists and kind people are weaklings who will immediately be raped and eaten after the apocalypse, and those that argue that compassion and art are not frivolities but essentials, and civilization is a choice we make every day.
I find the latter much more interesting as well as more enjoyable to read, so I was of course intrigued by this book. The prose is excellent, the mood is elegaic, and the structure, which makes use of a truly Shakespearean number of deliberate coincidences and revealed connections, is clever and well-done. I also liked the use of a comic book, Station Eleven, as a life’s work for its creator and, for its various readers, a talisman and a metaphor. The glimpses into the day-to-day life of the Symphony are great, and a lot of the during-apocalypse stuff was very haunting. I especially liked the small community that sets up in an airport.
I would have liked the book to do more with its best concept, the theatre troupe. We see quite a bit of their lives and hear a lot about what they think they’re doing, but we don’t experience much of the latter. David Brin’s The Postman is nowhere near this well-written or well-constructed, but it does effectively show how delivering letters changes both individuals and society. Very oddly given that this is literally what the entire book is about, we don’t see much of how the Symphony affects the towns it visits and individuals who see it. We’re told that it’s deeply meaningful, but we’re not shown it. We do see how it affects the members of the Symphony, but I also wanted to see how it affects the audiences.
I wish that had been given more page time, and Arthur had been given less. He’s thematically important but not very interesting as a character, and his pre-flu life got a lot more page time than it really needed.
I also had some big issues with plausibility. I can handwave scientific unlikelihoods, but I trip over sufficiently major logic issues and “people don’t do that” issues. The latter are especially noticeable when the whole book is premised on the idea that people will continue to behave like human beings rather than instantly revert to cannibalism: you expect them to behave like plausible human beings.
In a world in which society has undergone a complete collapse due to depopulation, but no physical items are damaged and a somewhat random selection of people survive, many in groups of anywhere from a few to several hundred, you would think that it would not take twenty years before anyone figures out how to get electricity or engines going again. Everyone uses gasoline to drive cars, power generators, etc, for a couple years until it goes bad, and then they just give up on the idea of electricity or motors and sit around having beautifully written and moving conversations about electricity as a symbol of all that they've lost. Even more egregiously, one person rigs a bicycle to generate electricity… and everyone just says, “Cool” and wanders off rather than trying to replicate it en masse.
I am the world’s least mechanically competent person, but under those circumstances even I would either have combed libraries until I figured out how to get power via wind, vegetable oil, or ethanol, or used my car to drive around until I found a mechanic who could do so before the last of the gas went stale. I definitely would have teamed up with Bicycle Dude to do more than get a laptop to turn on for ten minutes once. Also, diesel can last ten years or more.
Similarly, why was no one raiding pharmacies for antibiotics? Why wasn’t anybody trying to recreate penicillin with mold? The latter would be very difficult, but people are dropping dead of infection so it seems like a good thing to try. Many existing antibiotics can last for a minimum of 20 years and they're extremely common medications so pharmacies and hospitals would be full of them. Since most people are dead, even if pharmacies are getting depleted 20 years out the total antibiotic supply shouldn’t have completely run out.
In a story largely about the preservation of art and writing, why was no one hitting the library for anything but Shakespeare? Sure, survival is insufficient, but 1) survival is a prerequisite, 2) I’ll buy that the artists are doing their own thing, but nobody was doing a lot of extremely obvious survival-oriented stuff.
This especially came into play in two incidents that I found psychologically implausible and which undermined the entire point of the novel.
In one, one of a large group of survivors stranded at an airport is a woman who’s run out of her Effexor. They search for some in the airport and in its parking lot and can’t find any. They do not go into the town, which is only 20 miles away, to try a pharmacy. She gets sick from withdrawal, then walks into the woods before anyone can stop her, clearly to die. A short time later, the remaining survivors get frustrated with their limited and monotonous food supply and go to the town to fix that.
This made no sense on any level. Effexor is definitely a nasty drug to go cold turkey on, but it won’t kill you. Even given that everyone’s in shock, they’re all fairly functional and making other sensible decisions. If she’s that sick and desperate, why did no one even consider a pharmacy? Especially since the POV character in this section is a psychologist and a nice guy, who could have told them a pharmacy would definitely have it and also maybe should have talked to the person who was clearly suffering from a problem he had expertise in. If the point was the tragedy of dying due to a lack of meds, something fragile or hard to come by would have been a way better choice, as would something that couldn’t have been treated by the psychologist who was right there but inexplicably didn’t even try.
This would have been easier to ignore if it wasn’t for the even more egregious incident in which (minor plot spoiler) a guy escapes the flu by holing up in a Toronto apartment with his brother, who uses a wheelchair. Due to depopulation, they probably could have stayed in the city and scavenged food for the next ten years. However, they decide they need to leave (not really explained why other than the city is giving them the creeps), but the roads are clogged and it would impossible to maneuver a wheelchair. Wheelchair Brother then says that he doesn’t want to survive in such a depressing world and is going to kill himself. Other Brother, despite being shown to be a nice compassionate man and having probably lost everyone else he’s ever loved, does not even argue but just sits in the apartment while his brother commit suicide, checks to make sure he's dead, then leaves.
This was so WTF. If your beloved brother really couldn’t leave, why not stay with him? Why not fight to convince your last remaining loved one that he should at least try staying alive? If you really have to leave, why not rig a travois? (In Stephen King’s Dark Tower, one of the characters uses a wheelchair while traveling on foot in every sort of non-accessible terrain imaginable, and everyone else helps her push it, wrestles it along while she’s carried, searches for a better one, etc. It’s a huge pain in the ass, but she needs it and that’s that. So it's totally possible to write a book where a character uses a wheelchair in a non-wheelchair-friendly environment.)
Those incidents made me feel like the disabled characters were being used as examples of The Tragedy Of Those Who Cannot Survive In This Rough Post-Apocalyptic World, which was incredibly annoying because their deaths seemed completely preventable and the entire rest of the book made the argument that we need to care for each other and that neither things nor people should be judged on their survival value alone. I guess unless they’re depressed or use a wheelchair.
And in my final big nitpick, the flu is 100% fatal, but if you can avoid initial contact with infected people for the first day or two and hole up in your apartment once you realize what’s going on, you’ll survive: dead people don’t transmit it, it’s not airborne, and it doesn’t survive long on surfaces.
Given this, WAY more people should have survived. Like, shut-ins, people living alone and home sick with something else, homebodies, people in isolated areas, etc: almost all of them should have made it. This should also include a lot of technical people working in labs or other contained environments for days on end, so why did it kill 99.99% of the population and take 20 years for literally anybody to get even very limited electricity working? Survival based on natural immunity would have made more sense than survival based on lack of exposure.
That aside, I did generally enjoy this and would rec it if you’re interested in a different take on the post-apocalyptic genre.
Station Eleven
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2178600.html. Comment here or there.
This is a wonderful concept, especially the post-apocalyptic traveling theatre company, and the novel largely though not entirely does it justice. Post-apocalyptic novels can be roughly divided into those that argue that the structure of current society is all that keeps us from becoming cannibal rapists and kind people are weaklings who will immediately be raped and eaten after the apocalypse, and those that argue that compassion and art are not frivolities but essentials, and civilization is a choice we make every day.
I find the latter much more interesting as well as more enjoyable to read, so I was of course intrigued by this book. The prose is excellent, the mood is elegaic, and the structure, which makes use of a truly Shakespearean number of deliberate coincidences and revealed connections, is clever and well-done. I also liked the use of a comic book, Station Eleven, as a life’s work for its creator and, for its various readers, a talisman and a metaphor. The glimpses into the day-to-day life of the Symphony are great, and a lot of the during-apocalypse stuff was very haunting. I especially liked the small community that sets up in an airport.
I would have liked the book to do more with its best concept, the theatre troupe. We see quite a bit of their lives and hear a lot about what they think they’re doing, but we don’t experience much of the latter. David Brin’s The Postman is nowhere near this well-written or well-constructed, but it does effectively show how delivering letters changes both individuals and society. Very oddly given that this is literally what the entire book is about, we don’t see much of how the Symphony affects the towns it visits and individuals who see it. We’re told that it’s deeply meaningful, but we’re not shown it. We do see how it affects the members of the Symphony, but I also wanted to see how it affects the audiences.
I wish that had been given more page time, and Arthur had been given less. He’s thematically important but not very interesting as a character, and his pre-flu life got a lot more page time than it really needed.
I also had some big issues with plausibility. I can handwave scientific unlikelihoods, but I trip over sufficiently major logic issues and “people don’t do that” issues. The latter are especially noticeable when the whole book is premised on the idea that people will continue to behave like human beings rather than instantly revert to cannibalism: you expect them to behave like plausible human beings.
In a world in which society has undergone a complete collapse due to depopulation, but no physical items are damaged and a somewhat random selection of people survive, many in groups of anywhere from a few to several hundred, you would think that it would not take twenty years before anyone figures out how to get electricity or engines going again. Everyone uses gasoline to drive cars, power generators, etc, for a couple years until it goes bad, and then they just give up on the idea of electricity or motors and sit around having beautifully written and moving conversations about electricity as a symbol of all that they've lost. Even more egregiously, one person rigs a bicycle to generate electricity… and everyone just says, “Cool” and wanders off rather than trying to replicate it en masse.
I am the world’s least mechanically competent person, but under those circumstances even I would either have combed libraries until I figured out how to get power via wind, vegetable oil, or ethanol, or used my car to drive around until I found a mechanic who could do so before the last of the gas went stale. I definitely would have teamed up with Bicycle Dude to do more than get a laptop to turn on for ten minutes once. Also, diesel can last ten years or more.
Similarly, why was no one raiding pharmacies for antibiotics? Why wasn’t anybody trying to recreate penicillin with mold? The latter would be very difficult, but people are dropping dead of infection so it seems like a good thing to try. Many existing antibiotics can last for a minimum of 20 years and they're extremely common medications so pharmacies and hospitals would be full of them. Since most people are dead, even if pharmacies are getting depleted 20 years out the total antibiotic supply shouldn’t have completely run out.
In a story largely about the preservation of art and writing, why was no one hitting the library for anything but Shakespeare? Sure, survival is insufficient, but 1) survival is a prerequisite, 2) I’ll buy that the artists are doing their own thing, but nobody was doing a lot of extremely obvious survival-oriented stuff.
This especially came into play in two incidents that I found psychologically implausible and which undermined the entire point of the novel.
In one, one of a large group of survivors stranded at an airport is a woman who’s run out of her Effexor. They search for some in the airport and in its parking lot and can’t find any. They do not go into the town, which is only 20 miles away, to try a pharmacy. She gets sick from withdrawal, then walks into the woods before anyone can stop her, clearly to die. A short time later, the remaining survivors get frustrated with their limited and monotonous food supply and go to the town to fix that.
This made no sense on any level. Effexor is definitely a nasty drug to go cold turkey on, but it won’t kill you. Even given that everyone’s in shock, they’re all fairly functional and making other sensible decisions. If she’s that sick and desperate, why did no one even consider a pharmacy? Especially since the POV character in this section is a psychologist and a nice guy, who could have told them a pharmacy would definitely have it and also maybe should have talked to the person who was clearly suffering from a problem he had expertise in. If the point was the tragedy of dying due to a lack of meds, something fragile or hard to come by would have been a way better choice, as would something that couldn’t have been treated by the psychologist who was right there but inexplicably didn’t even try.
This would have been easier to ignore if it wasn’t for the even more egregious incident in which (minor plot spoiler) a guy escapes the flu by holing up in a Toronto apartment with his brother, who uses a wheelchair. Due to depopulation, they probably could have stayed in the city and scavenged food for the next ten years. However, they decide they need to leave (not really explained why other than the city is giving them the creeps), but the roads are clogged and it would impossible to maneuver a wheelchair. Wheelchair Brother then says that he doesn’t want to survive in such a depressing world and is going to kill himself. Other Brother, despite being shown to be a nice compassionate man and having probably lost everyone else he’s ever loved, does not even argue but just sits in the apartment while his brother commit suicide, checks to make sure he's dead, then leaves.
This was so WTF. If your beloved brother really couldn’t leave, why not stay with him? Why not fight to convince your last remaining loved one that he should at least try staying alive? If you really have to leave, why not rig a travois? (In Stephen King’s Dark Tower, one of the characters uses a wheelchair while traveling on foot in every sort of non-accessible terrain imaginable, and everyone else helps her push it, wrestles it along while she’s carried, searches for a better one, etc. It’s a huge pain in the ass, but she needs it and that’s that. So it's totally possible to write a book where a character uses a wheelchair in a non-wheelchair-friendly environment.)
Those incidents made me feel like the disabled characters were being used as examples of The Tragedy Of Those Who Cannot Survive In This Rough Post-Apocalyptic World, which was incredibly annoying because their deaths seemed completely preventable and the entire rest of the book made the argument that we need to care for each other and that neither things nor people should be judged on their survival value alone. I guess unless they’re depressed or use a wheelchair.
And in my final big nitpick, the flu is 100% fatal, but if you can avoid initial contact with infected people for the first day or two and hole up in your apartment once you realize what’s going on, you’ll survive: dead people don’t transmit it, it’s not airborne, and it doesn’t survive long on surfaces.
Given this, WAY more people should have survived. Like, shut-ins, people living alone and home sick with something else, homebodies, people in isolated areas, etc: almost all of them should have made it. This should also include a lot of technical people working in labs or other contained environments for days on end, so why did it kill 99.99% of the population and take 20 years for literally anybody to get even very limited electricity working? Survival based on natural immunity would have made more sense than survival based on lack of exposure.
That aside, I did generally enjoy this and would rec it if you’re interested in a different take on the post-apocalyptic genre.
Station Eleven
Crossposted to https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2178600.html. Comment here or there.