Stations
I don’t know what attracted me Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, another entry in the unending line of post-apocalyptic fare. Perhaps it was that the catastrophe was caused by a flu and not environmental issues. 99% of the earth’s population is wiped out. Within months all the conveniences moderns take for granted are gone. The struggle for survival ensues, and it’s not pretty, similar to TV’s The Walking Dead but not as bleak. It is a multi-character epic told in non-linear style, set largely in the area along Lake Michigan. I recognized many of the town names from my days as a college student at WMU in Kalamazoo. The main focus of the narrative is a traveling show that performs classical music and Shakespeare, although the most important quote is from Star Trek Voyager, episode 122, written by Ronald D. Moore: “Survival is insufficient.” I especially like the appreciation survivors have for what they once had, although it is a bit belabored. The prose and dialogue are solid. It’s not an easy read, although the 333 pages of the large paperback version seem considerably less because the novel is broken into nine parts, blank pages in between. The title refers to a sci-fi comic a character completes shortly before the disease begins to spread. Unlike the relentlessly grim The Walking Dead, the novel ends on a glimmer of hope. 4100+ users at Amazon have rated Station Eleven, forging to a consensus of 4.1 on a scale of five. I’ll go with 3.25. Published in 2014, it is still being discovered, at last check ranked 1300th at Jeff Bezo’s behemoth, where there are at least 13 million books listed. A movie version is in the works. According to Wiki, the novel was nominated for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Toronto Book Award. Mandel was born in 1979 on a small island in British Columbia, the same as a couple of the novel’s characters. She left at 18 to study dance in Toronto, lived briefly in Montreal, and now lives in NYC. She had written three other novels before hitting the jackpot with Station Eleven. Here she is:
The lack of parking at my usual station sent the floating book shop back to Bay Parkway for a third straight day. My thanks to the woman who bought Song Of The Skylark by Erica James and Finding Sophie by Irene N. Watts, and to the gentleman who purchased five books in Russian; and to the woman who went home with one; and to the gentleman who dropped off a huge thriller he’d just finished.
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