A Forgotten Book

When you have a list of over 400 books on your to-read list, you tend to forget that you put some of them on the list. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is one of those books. I used the randomizer on my Goodreads list to give me my next book after Landline. It gave me Station Eleven. I tried racking my brain, willing myself to recall when I put this on my list and my mind couldn’t come up anything. I guess that is what happens with over 400 books on your list.

Station Eleven is about the post-collapse United States and Canada and the characters that have lived through it (and some that haven’t).  A flu broke out in Toronto that had an incubation period of less than 24 hours once exposed.  Only 1 in 3000 survived the outbreak.  Everything is gone - electricity, internet, gas, everything that we take for granted all gone in a couple of years.  The story moves back and forth between pre-collapse and post-collapse as well as between 3 main character lives.  

Spanning the course of survival over 20+ years, the stories intertwine in a way that makes it seem realistic. I know that might seem obvious to some but take it from a girl who reads and watches many post apocalyptic books and movies - many don’t seem real. There always seems to be an out of the blue or miraculous change at the end that makes everything better and it happens over the course of a year or 2. That isn’t the case with Station Eleven. The world really does end and the survivors have to figure out how to live in a world completely different than what they have known.  There is no quick and easy solution; it reminds me of The Walking Dead. So many people are waiting for the show to tell the viewers how the zombie apocalypse started when in reality it doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is that it happened and it can’t be reversed. Same as in Station Eleven; the Georgia Flu happened killing millions of people and now the ones that weren’t infected have to learn this new world where everything they knew and depended on no longer applies to their lives.

Each of these characters are connected but only the reader knows just how much. The isolation of the central characters after the collapse is so moving that you feel like you are one of them, walking through the woods alone and hungry, surviving in an international airport 20 years after the collapse or running for your life from people trying to steal your backpack full of provisions.

Mandel has a powerful voice when it comes to storytelling. She evokes emotion in every sentence she writes, willing the reader to feel exactly what each of the characters are feeling. She makes it effortless to imagine Jeevan living in a highrise in the 60 days after the collapse; Clark walking through a major international airport where there are only 100 people in the entire complex; and Kirsten coming up to a small town that is no more than a run down IHOP, gas station and thoroughly picked through Wal-Mart.  She writes with a clear voice, a full heart and doesn’t get too bogged down with unnecessary characters or imagery.

The books sends powerful messages to the readers. First and foremost don’t rely too heavily on things that are expendable like phones, computers, internet because one day they might not exist.  Appreciate the things in life that are all around us - flowers, trees, nature.  But the one thing that I believe Mandel is trying to get through to the reader is that material things might go away but the one thing you can’t live without is people.  Whether it is a physical person right in front of you or the memory of someone, the human interaction is what drives us and keeps us alive. Mandel portrays that in so many ways and so many relationships - Kristen and Arthur, Arthur and Clark, Clark and Elizabeth, Elizabeth ant Tyler, Tyler and Kirsten.  Everything comes back to each other because our stories are intertwined with everyone we meet and in this post-apocalyptic world, everyone means something to someone.