![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Reading: Station Eleven
Jul. 2nd, 2016 03:45 pmI generally try to avoid postapocalyptic novels, on the grounds that they only tend to exacerbate the underlying fear of the end of the world that I've lived with since I was a child in the 1980s. (I didn't always avoid them; I can remember reading Children of the Dust and Z for Zachariah searching for some hope, a faith that there might actually be something on the other side, a future after the Bomb dropped. Children of the Dust is actually quite optimistic, a few generations on. Z for Zachariah, not so much.) But lots of people had told me how good Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven was, so I thought I'd take advantage of the fact that the current political situation has made me so gloomy that I don't have much room for the fear of everything falling apart, so I thought I'd give it a try.
In essence, Station Eleven tells the stories of a group of people, all loosely connected by an actor who collapsed and died onstage the night that a devastating flu pandemic began. The stories circle around that night, lives before and after the coming of the illness that wiped out almost the entire human population and brought about the collapse of modern civilisation. The book doesn't follow a linear structure, moving instead between the post-collapse future, where people live in small isolated communities in the ruins of the modern world (one of the largest communities is in an abandoned airport, where people live in tents on the airport concourse or inside planes which will never fly again), the only fragile links between them traders and a travelling band of actors and musicians who perform Shakespeare to the communities they pass through, and the mundane pre-collapse lives of jobs and relationships, marriage and divorce and friendship, global travel and instantaneous communication.
It's actually not a gloomy book. The post-collapse world is short on comfort and long on danger, and the sadness at the loss of the old world is always present, but Mandel is good at conveying the beauty of the natural world, and of the world returning to nature, as her characters move through it. There is still art, and friendship, and love, and a hope for the future. The pre-collapse world, on the other hand, is full of people communicating with each other without really saying anything, people who spend their lives doing things they hate surrounded by the bleak impersonality of cities. Like the more optimistic post-apocalyptic novels of my youth, there's a sense that maybe a return to a simpler world might be a good thing, and as far as ways of killing most of the human race go a virulent flu virus which results in death within hours of infection isn't as bad a way to go as some (we only actually see one character succumb to the virus, and it seems relatively painless). And it's beautifully written. On the other hand, I'm not sure it was the ideal book to read in an afternoon while alone in the house...
In essence, Station Eleven tells the stories of a group of people, all loosely connected by an actor who collapsed and died onstage the night that a devastating flu pandemic began. The stories circle around that night, lives before and after the coming of the illness that wiped out almost the entire human population and brought about the collapse of modern civilisation. The book doesn't follow a linear structure, moving instead between the post-collapse future, where people live in small isolated communities in the ruins of the modern world (one of the largest communities is in an abandoned airport, where people live in tents on the airport concourse or inside planes which will never fly again), the only fragile links between them traders and a travelling band of actors and musicians who perform Shakespeare to the communities they pass through, and the mundane pre-collapse lives of jobs and relationships, marriage and divorce and friendship, global travel and instantaneous communication.
It's actually not a gloomy book. The post-collapse world is short on comfort and long on danger, and the sadness at the loss of the old world is always present, but Mandel is good at conveying the beauty of the natural world, and of the world returning to nature, as her characters move through it. There is still art, and friendship, and love, and a hope for the future. The pre-collapse world, on the other hand, is full of people communicating with each other without really saying anything, people who spend their lives doing things they hate surrounded by the bleak impersonality of cities. Like the more optimistic post-apocalyptic novels of my youth, there's a sense that maybe a return to a simpler world might be a good thing, and as far as ways of killing most of the human race go a virulent flu virus which results in death within hours of infection isn't as bad a way to go as some (we only actually see one character succumb to the virus, and it seems relatively painless). And it's beautifully written. On the other hand, I'm not sure it was the ideal book to read in an afternoon while alone in the house...
