Station Eleven

Station Eleven, novel by Emily St. John Mandel, published in 2014. Mandel’s fourth novel, Station Eleven tells the story of a devastating flu pandemic and the postapocalyptic world order forged by the pandemic’s survivors.

Summary

As befits a novel concerned with mortality, grief, and resilience, Station Eleven’s point of departure is a death scene. The novel opens with Arthur Leander, a Hollywood star, suffering a heart attack during his performance as King Lear in a Toronto production of Shakespeare’s play. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paramedic-in-training, administers first aid, but Arthur is soon pronounced dead. Later that same evening, Jeevan is warned that he must leave Toronto immediately; the Georgia Flu, the SARS-like illness being reported on the news, is ravaging the city. Jeevan stocks up on supplies and heads to the apartment of his brother Frank, intending for the two to hole up together for the duration of the crisis.

In its next section, Station Eleven leaps forward. It is now 20 years since the Georgia Flu wiped out 99 percent of humanity and precipitated “the collapse,” the end of electricity and associated forms of technology and civilization. Among the survivors is Kirsten Raymonde, a woman in her late 20s who had been a child costar of Arthur in that production of King Lear. Kirsten now belongs to the Traveling Symphony, an itinerant group of actors and musicians who move between the small settlements that have formed in the Great Lakes region of North America in the aftermath of the collapse, performing Shakespeare and classical music. The Traveling Symphony’s motto, which is also emblazoned on one of the horse-drawn trucks that make up their caravan, is “Because survival is insufficient.”

Kirsten has few memories of the pre-collapse era and has retained a few objects from that time, treating them as clues to a way of life that has become obsolete and inaccessible. Among these few treasured artifacts are two installments of a comic book, Dr. Eleven, which she dimly remembers having received as a gift from Arthur and which was written by Arthur’s first wife, Miranda Carroll.

Upon arriving at one of the stops on their tour, the Traveling Symphony discovers that the settlement has been taken over by a violent, armed group whose leader is known as “the prophet.” Convinced that the pandemic was divinely ordained, a cleansing act designed to rid the world of the less pure and worthy, the prophet believes himself and his followers to be representatives of “the light” and that any violent acts they commit against their antagonists are therefore justified.

The remainder of the novel toggles back and forth among three temporal planes: the pre-pandemic life of several of the main characters, the early days of the pandemic, and the years after the collapse. These scenes gradually reveal the connections among Kirsten, the prophet, and Miranda, as well as the fates of Jeevan, Frank, and other characters introduced at the novel’s outset. The final scenes take place in the present and are centered on the Museum of Civilization, a repository of artifacts from pre-pandemic times, located in the fictional town of Severn City. The story ends in a spirit of fragile, cautious optimism: we see the electric lights of a nearby town, which suggests that civilization is beginning to emerge from the darkness of “the collapse.”

Reception and legacy

Station Eleven was both a critical and commercial success. Mandel’s novel won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2024 it appeared on The New York Times’ list of the 100 best books of the 21st century thus far, as voted on by a group of more than 500 writers and critics. It has sold more than 1.5 million copies and has been translated into 35 languages.

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Several of the novel’s critics have called attention to Station Eleven’s elegiac tone, how the future that it depicts is filled with people oriented toward the past, grieving or mourning the world before “the collapse” and the loved ones who were a part of it. For those who admire the novel, Mandel’s postapocalyptic world is one that allows readers to perceive the “grace of everyday existence” and to appreciate the fragility of achievements and innovations that are generally taken for granted. Other commentators have suggested that these same attributes are indicative of the novel’s failure to recognize violence, both interpersonal and between social groups, as a substantial element of human history or to contend with how that history continues to reverberate in the present.

In March 2020, with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a resurgence of interest in Station Eleven, with readers online and media outlets appealing to Mandel for advice on how to navigate a pandemic. In interviews, Mandel has expressed discomfort at having been cast in the role of “pandemic prophet” and wrote about the experience in Sea of Tranquility, her 2022 novel that features a novelist navigating a pandemic after having written a pandemic novel.

Station Eleven was adapted into a television limited series by the novelist Patrick Somerville. The 10-part series debuted on the streaming service HBO Max in December 2021.