Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven is and will always be one of my favourite novels. It was a perspective-changing read that heavily impacted how I view apocalypse fiction and society. I read the book before the pandemic hit around 2017, and I loved every word. After re-reading the novel post-pandemic, I gained a new appreciation for the book and Mandel’s writing.
Station Eleven is a pandemic apocalypse fiction where a deadly cold-like virus causes the ‘end of the world’ and the breakdown of society. It follows multiple characters through multiple points of the ‘end of the world’. Each character’s story has an interesting way of intertwining with another character’s apocalyptic experience. The timelines are wonderfully interwoven, giving an expansive view of how the world ended, how people set out to survive the apocalypse, and how the post-apocalypse society functions.
While many people may be fed up with apocalypse and pandemic fiction, Station Eleven is a stand-out novel within the ‘end of the world’ narrative. Yes, the world ends, society crumbles, and antagonists threaten our protagonists as they attempt to survive. Still, unlike many other apocalyptic narratives Station Eleven not only explores how society can fall but the ways in which humanity can rebuild society.
Rather than focusing on the worst of human nature and the ways that humanity inevitably destroys itself, Station Eleven is a hopeful story exploring the ways that complete strangers can come together and create a village and the ways that even through the worst of disasters, humanity will find a way to go on, to learn and patch ourselves up building the world back brick by brick, inevitability changed but growing and thriving. That is not to say that the novel is a solely positive experience; there is death, heartbreak, and many challenges that each character faces throughout the fall of society. But Mandel reminds us that death is not always awfully tragic and that nostalgia for what we lose can be a wonderfully bittersweet experience. This novel will make you cry, and yearn for your own nostalgic moments, but it will also give you the hope that maybe things might just work out even in the hardest of situations.
Station Eleven is not just a tale of survival; it is an exploration of life and living. Mandel’s fiction explores, to quote the novel, ‘what’s best about the world’ even when that world has fallen apart around us.
Review by Marcia Sanderson, Information Adviser at York St John.
