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In “Station Eleven,” All Art Is Adaptation

By Katy Waldman

Illustration of a theater stage overgrown

“Station Eleven,” Emily St. John Mandel’s hit novel, from 2014, is the kind of book you gulp down in a sitting. I recently reread it in an afternoon; my partner devoured it on two short flights and a layover. The book inspires the sort of voraciousness that it ascribes to its virus, which blazes around the globe in a matter of days, killing ninety-nine per cent of the people in its path. The story’s main action takes place twenty years later, in the “After,” where a fierce young woman named Kirsten tours with a band of Shakespearean players, encountering agrarian communes and violent cults, keeping the flame of art alive. That time line has a clear, tight shape—it builds to a climactic confrontation and the resolution of a mystery—but Mandel splices it with flashbacks to the “Before,” our familiar, dazzling chaos of electricity, cars, and cell phones. There, the seductive figure of Arthur Leander, a playboy actor who dies onstage of a heart attack, bridges far-flung character arcs. We meet his ex-wife Miranda, whose pensive comic book about a stranded astronaut, “Station Eleven,” falls into Kirsten’s hands; Jeevan, an aspiring E.M.T.; and Leander’s second ex-wife, Elizabeth, and son, Tyler.

It’s not always easy to pinpoint what makes a book “unputdownable,” what gives it the feverishly consuming quality that “ Station Eleven ” has. (Although COVID -19 adds fangs to the premise, the novel was wildly popular before the pandemic.) But some of the book’s swiftness derives from its consistency—from a tone that never changes or breaks, slipping through your body like a pure, bright beam. For all their disparate circumstances, Mandel’s characters can evoke variations on a single person: wistful and dreamy, with a competent, vigorous exterior; invested in values such as beauty and goodness; and working to surmount their flaws. The over-all impression is of an author less interested in individuals than in manifesting a minor-key mood coupled with a hopeful, humanist vision.

“ Station Eleven ,” the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Where the book felt stylized, more like poetry or a fable, the series embraces the messiness, range, and complexity of life as real people live it. One doesn’t binge it; ideally one watches its ten episodes slowly, more than once. And it differentiates the novel’s characters, allowing them to summon a wider breadth of experience. On a superficial level, Miranda is now a Black woman with roots in the Caribbean. Arthur was born in Mexico, not British Columbia, and is also more than simply charming; he exudes a sly, almost dangerous sweetness. Jeevan (a soulful Himesh Patel) becomes a freelance culture critic—“I don’t have a job,” he clarifies—who, rather than surge into action during Arthur’s heart attack, can only stand by helplessly. He adopts a girl—an eight-year-old Kirsten—whose parents have disappeared with the onset of the virus, and one of the show’s time lines follows him, the child, and Jeevan’s brother Frank as they hole up in Frank’s apartment tower to wait out the apocalypse.

The show takes one particularly smart liberty with its source material, rethinking art, what it does, and why it matters. Mandel infuses her novel with traditional aestheticism. A wagon in Kirsten’s troupe, the Traveling Symphony, bears a slogan cribbed from “Star Trek”: “Survival is insufficient.” The book’s pandemic survivors are desperate for music, poetry, and performance, and they hunger for scraps of text, even from a brooding comic about space travel. (Onscreen, Jeevan is allowed to wail that the titular cartoon is “so pretentious!”—an opinion that would upend Mandel’s delicately reverent atmosphere.) For post-pandemic audiences, the purest, strongest drugs are Beethoven and the Bard. As one member of the Symphony says, “People want what was best about the world.”

Art may be the world’s premium product, but, for Mandel, it is also not entirely of the world. Its unearthly qualities are represented in part by the spaceman of Miranda’s comic. Here, the novel draws on the old, melancholy notion of art as a beautiful lie. According to the book’s organizing metaphor, “Before” was all theatre, lights, and fantasy; “After” is like waking up, as a planet, from a discombobulating dream. It’s no accident that Arthur’s death ushers in the new order. He is a mascot of pre-pandemic civilization: wealthy, famous, and magnetic, but too entranced by trifles. After the flu hits, humans lose the protection of political institutions, and suffer waves of looting and extremism, but they eventually reconstitute themselves in agrarian coöperatives. They no longer care about impressing one another at dinner parties; they crave “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The Symphony forms to recapture glimmers of what was lost. In the book’s careful balance, the old dispensation’s ruin is offset by what these characters have gained—and yet an air of romantic nostalgia, of mourning, prevails.

In short, the book is of a piece with an Arcadian literary tradition that laments the end of paradise but holds up knowledge as a consolation. The adaptation, created by Patrick Somerville, rejects much of this pastoralism. Indeed, Somerville’s attitude toward art seems almost practical by comparison. His texts have a specific purpose: they serve as trapdoors into the subjectivities of the living and the dead. Art matters to the world of this “Station Eleven” not just because it strengthens the social fabric—it’s an experience people can share—but because it notates and preserves the luminously erratic lives that the show itself is at great pains to capture. Miranda’s literary achievement, in her comic, proves secondary to the miraculous way in which it responds to characters’ particular emotions and conflicts. Why do we need art when the world has ended? Because, Somerville answers, it encodes the vivid presence of everyone who’s gone.

A lesser show might make a bolder claim. It might, for instance, reduce Mandel’s aestheticism to grandiose platitudes about how art can save us. But the fact that survival isn’t sufficient does not mean that art is . In both versions of “Station Eleven,” beauty’s power over death is provisional and fleeting; on the show, it’s not even close. While staying in Frank’s aerie in Chicago, the eight-year-old Kirsten directs the brothers in a reënactment of a scene from her comic book. The performance is meant to distract the trio from looming loss; with food supplies dwindling, Jeevan wants to leave the tower, and Frank wants to stay. That they decide to postpone “real life” for art’s sake, for the play, accelerates disaster—an intruder has time to burst in—and yet the scene, in which the comic’s protagonist, Doctor Eleven, bids farewell to his mentor, is also a consecration. Without it, the brothers wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye to one another. Speaking as characters, they become most completely themselves.

Twenty years later, Kirsten’s worn copy of “Station Eleven” has become talismanic to her. Lines from the text reverberate through the show—“I remember damage,” “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die.” The cartoon binds Kirsten to a man known only, at first, as the Prophet. Played by Daniel Zovatto, he’s unnervingly soft-voiced and serene, like someone whose pain has alienated him from feeling. He seems to know the words of “Station Eleven” by heart, but his reading of it discards the theme of memory. In fact, he has crafted a youth movement around one particular snippet: “There is no before.”

The book withholds the Prophet’s identity until its last act, contributing to its elegant velocity. Somerville, though, unknots the enigma (spoiler: the Prophet is Tyler, Arthur Leander’s son) almost as soon as the character is introduced. In the novel, Tyler is familiar with “Station Eleven,” the comic written by his father’s former wife, but more enthralled by the Bible, with its doomsday imagery and insistence that everything happens for a reason. A straightforward villain, he incarnates the deceptive uses of fiction, the narcotic power of too-tidy explanations. The show, in turning him into a “Station Eleven” superfan, dims the focus on how art can lead people astray. Now the crucial fact seems to be that two fervent readers, Tyler and Kirsten, are interpreting the same text differently.

The shift is telling. HBO’s “Station Eleven” is obsessed with adaptation, the way that people (many of them actors) reuse and project upon a source. It’s awash in references: Christmas carols, the funk band Parliament, Bob Dylan, “King Lear” and “Hamlet.” There’s also the most transcendent cover of rap music that I’ve ever seen on TV, a set piece that somehow crystallizes a character, a situation, and the human situation, all at once. Most of the art featured on the series doesn’t exist in its original form. It comes filtered through individuals, who carry and change it in time—shaping, recontextualizing, extracting what they need. One feels as though Somerville were triangulating between the texts and his characters to locate some mysterious quality that hovers in the middle. When Kirsten, Jeevan, and Frank stage “Station Eleven,” for example, the play works because the actors and the dynamics among them are so real. Yet the players grow more alive in the performance; their actual dynamics are heightened by it.

In reconsidering what makes art valuable, Somerville does not so much dispute Mandel’s judgments about the past (shining and false) and the future (real and hard) as collapse them. Episodes alternate between the current adventures of the Symphony and the immediate aftermath of the flu, as well as passages from the protagonists’ more distant histories. These melded chronologies seem to insist on the simultaneity of life and memory, just as they evoke the blur of fact and fantasy. Characters’ experiences, like their fictions, become indelible and living parts of them. At one point, Kirsten-as-Hamlet recites a monologue about bereavement while her eight-year-old self is shown discovering that her parents are dead. Later, she hallucinates that she has returned as an adult to Frank’s high-rise, where she watches, again, the ghostly play.

If, in the book, “survival is insufficient” sets up a comparison between life and art, the series suggests—in a limited but real sense—that they’re one and the same. Throughout the show, there’s a thousand-yard P.O.V. shot that intrudes in moments of death or transformation. It’s meant to evoke the perspective of Doctor Eleven, tranquilly observing from space, but it could easily belong to a past or future version of any of the characters, or to a chorus of the flu dead. Early in the novel, after Jeevan tries and fails to revive Arthur, he looks up at the theatre’s “cavernous” emptiness: “fathoms of catwalks and lights between which a soul might slip undetected.” But, in the adaptation of this moment, the perspective is reversed. Instead of peering through Jeevan’s eyes, the camera stays on him while soaring higher and higher. The human body shrinks as the show’s vantage fuses with that of the departed soul. It’s as if art’s job is to let no one go undetected—to provide the audience that most people, real or imaginary or absent, would be lucky to deserve.

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Station Eleven

Emily st. john mandel.

333 pages, Hardcover

First published August 26, 2014

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“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

“Survival is insufficient.”

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” ———— “First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

“If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?” “I suppose.” “If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.”

“We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.”

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2014

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STATION ELEVEN

by Emily St. John Mandel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2014

Mandel’s solid writing and magnetic narrative make for a strong combination in what should be a breakout novel.

Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness.

In her fourth novel, Mandel ( The Lola Quartet , 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but keeps much of the intrigue. The story concerns the before and after of a catastrophic virus called the Georgia Flu that wipes out most of the world’s population. On one side of the timeline are the survivors, mainly a traveling troupe of musicians and actors and a stationary group stuck for years in an airport. On the other is a professional actor, who dies in the opening pages while performing King Lear , his ex-wives and his oldest friend, glimpsed in flashbacks. There’s also the man—a paparazzo-turned-paramedic—who runs to the stage from the audience to try to revive him, a Samaritan role he will play again in later years. Mandel is effectively spare in her depiction of both the tough hand-to-mouth existence of a devastated world and the almost unchallenged life of the celebrity—think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. The intrigue arises when the troupe is threatened by a cult and breaks into disparate offshoots struggling toward a common haven. Woven through these little odysseys, and cunningly linking the cushy past and the perilous present, is a figure called the Prophet. Indeed, Mandel spins a satisfying web of coincidence and kismet while providing numerous strong moments, as when one of the last planes lands at the airport and seals its doors in self-imposed quarantine, standing for days on the tarmac as those outside try not to ponder the nightmare within. Another strand of that web is a well-traveled copy of a sci-fi graphic novel drawn by the actor’s first wife, depicting a space station seeking a new home after aliens take over Earth—a different sort of artist also pondering man’s fate and future.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-385-35330-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014

LITERARY FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | APOCALYPTIC & POST APOCALYPTIC SCI-FI

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by Emily St. John Mandel

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BOOK TO SCREEN

Station Eleven Miniseries to Star Mackenzie Davis

HBO Max Wins Film Rights to Lyla Lee YA Novel

SEEN & HEARD

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

More by Max Brooks

by Max Brooks

THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

From the remembrance of earth's past series , vol. 1.

by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2014

Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.

Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.

In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

SCIENCE FICTION

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Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven … 'a book that builds cumulative power'.

Station Eleven review – Emily St John Mandel's gripping apocalypse drama

I n her much-tipped fourth novel, longlisted last week for a US National Book award , Canadian author Emily St John Mandel makes something subtle and unusual out of elements that have become garishly overfamiliar. A virulent new strain of flu that "exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth", wiping out 99% of humanity; characters holed up in tower blocks while the world collapses around them; "unspeakable years" in which the unlucky survivors walk blasted roads in search of vestiges of civilisation; crazed prophets leading murderous cults and "ferals" leaping out from behind bushes. We all know the script, as Mandel drily notes when one character begins a supermarket sweep of bottled water and tinned food: "Jeevan's understanding of disaster preparedness was based entirely on action movies, but on the other hand, he'd seen a lot of action movies."

But whereas most apocalypse novels push grimly forward into horror or dystopia, Station Eleven skips back and forth between the pre-flu world and Year Twenty after global collapse, when the worst is over and survivors have banded together into isolated settlements. Gradually, the book builds cumulative power as connections are made between the two time frames, and characters who do or don't survive: including Jeevan, a paparazzo who planned to become a paramedic; Kirsten, a child actor who grows up to perform Shakespeare after the pandemic; and Miranda, whose creative energies were poured into a hand-drawn comic called Station Eleven which miraculously survives, becoming both a totem of the old world and a distorted mirror of the new.

The man who links them all, Arthur Leander, is a famous actor who dies on stage just before the Georgia Flu sweeps the world. Though he doesn't experience the catastrophe, his story is at the heart of the book, and this is typical of Mandel's roving, slantwise focus. For the last night on earth before the lights start to go out, she dwells on the production of King Lear which is Arthur's last; in the post-pandemic world, she follows Kirsten and the rest of the Travelling Symphony, a peripatetic band of actors and musicians whose motto, taken from Star Trek , is "survival is insufficient". They struggle and squabble – someone has scribbled "Hell is other people" inside one of their caravans, and someone else has crossed out "other people" and written "flutes" – but find safety and purpose as well as "moments of transcendent beauty" in their shared endeavour.

Such frozen moments appear as tableaux throughout the book: fake snow falling on the cast of King Lear as they gather around the fallen Arthur; Miranda gazing from a twilit beach at huge lit-up ships out to sea as the world comes to a standstill; the flat, eerie panels of Miranda's Station Eleven. Unlike Anne Washburn in her recent play Mr Burns , which also featured a travelling band of actors in a dystopic future America, Mandel isn't interested in how apocalypse might act upon art: this is very much a novel about individual rather than collective destiny. The glacial calm of her prose extends to the characters, so that while the book is visually stunning, dreamily atmospheric and impressively gripping, we never feel the urgency and panic of global disaster, let alone its moral weight.

But perhaps that is beside the point. Station Eleven is not so much about apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning; the effort of art to deepen our fleeting impressions of the world and bolster our solitude. Mandel evokes the weary feeling of life slipping away, for Arthur as an individual and then writ large upon the entire world. In Year Twenty, Kirsten, who was eight when the flu hit, is interviewed about her memories, and says that the new reality is hardest to bear for those old enough to remember how the world was before. "The more you remember, the more you've lost," she explains – a sentiment that could apply to any of us, here and now.

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Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven , Emily St. John Mandel. New York: Knopf, 2014.

Summary: An account of the end of civilization as we know it after a catastrophic pandemic, and how survivors sought to keep beauty and the memory of what was alive as they struggled against destructive forces to rebuild human society.

Arthur Leander, an accomplished actor who burned through marriages, is on stage in the middle of performing King Lear when his own heart gives out and he dies on stage, despite the effort of a medic in training, Jeevan. Watching is a young child actor, Kirsten Raymonde, who often talked to Arthur. A kind woman takes her aside, noticing an unusual graphic novel of a settlement of survivors on a watery planet, Station Eleven, a gift from Arthur that Kirsten carries for the next twenty years.

That night, as the snow fell on Toronto, was the beginning of the end of civilization. Jeevan’s friend Hua, working at a hospital, calls, urging Jeevan to leave immediately. The hospital is full of flu cases, many but not all from a plane from Russia. Before long, every last one is dead, and all who came in contact are sick, including Hua. None will live. In days, nearly everyone around the world dies. The media goes dead, then the internet, and finally utilities. Planes are grounded. Permanently. Cars run out of gas. Only about one in two hundred and fifty survive.

Emily St. John Mandel, in Station Eleven , imagines a post-pandemic, post-civilization world. Yes, it is a world of predators. Kirsten, a survivor has two knives tattooed on her wrist, the lives taken by her knives. She doesn’t remember her first year, and doesn’t want to. But there are also those who seek to hold on to remnants of beauty. She is part of the Traveling Symphony, a group of musicians and actors on a circuit up and down Michigan, performing great music and the works of Shakespeare.

Some towns reconstitute themselves. And some become dangerous. One, St Deborah by the Water, has been taken over by The Prophet and his cult, a Jonestown-type scenario. The Traveling Symphony escapes, along with a child who stows away to escape becoming another of The Prophet’s brides. This sets up a climactic confrontation.

The story goes back and forth tracing the lives of the people connected to Arthur and that night in Toronto, both before and after the pandemic. We meet Clark, a gay actor friend of Arthur’s, one of the survivors living at the Severn City Airport, where flights had been grounded, turning it into its own community. He becomes a curator of The Museum of Civilization, with artifacts from laptops and smartphones to newspapers, all from the time before the pandemic. There was a former wife of Arthur there as well, with their child, Tyler, who has a disturbing habit of quoting apocalyptic passages from the Bible. They eventually leave. Jeevan eventually walks a thousand miles from Toronto to a settlement in what was Virginia.

And there is Miranda Carroll, the artist of Station Eleven . We learn her story, how she met and married author and wrote and drew Station Eleven, giving Arthur two copies shortly before his death…and hers.

Beyond imagining what a world nearly wiped out by a pandemic might be like (a prescient book, written six years before 2020), Mandel explores the powerful longing to cling to the good and the beautiful, and to human community, even when all else falls apart. She reminds us that the complex thing we call civilization is actually a thin veneer, easily stripped away. The question is, what then remains? When the veneer falls away, will there be brutes or beauties?

And what stories will shape us, and how will we read them? There were two copies of Station Eleven. Kirsten had one, and it profoundly shaped her imagination. We learn that the other copy also shaped an imagination, but quite differently. We’re reminded not only of the power of story but also that no two people read a story in the same way.

One final caveat. Don’t do what I did and read the opening chapters of the book the day before returning home on a plane full of people. Those who have read Station Eleven will understand.

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Station Eleven by Emily St John, book review: Hope amidst an apocalypse

Mandel’s message is that civilisation – and just as importantly, art – will endure as long as there is life, article bookmarked.

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Post-apocalypse novels are, by their definition, often bleak, downbeat tales, concerned as they generally are with the complete and utter collapse of society as we know it.

Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven follows the traditional route for wiping out much of humanity and re-setting the species’s clock – a particularly virulent strain of influenza, the Georgia Flu, sweeps across the globe leaving those who contract it dead within 48 hours. One survivor estimates that the pandemic has claimed the lives of 99.99 per cent of the global population. Most post-apocalyptic novels deal with the lawless, horrible aftermath of such a crisis, where the dregs of humanity battle it out for food, water and survival, or the far future where our present world is a barely-understood dream of impossible flying machines and boxes across which pictures magically danced.

This is where Mandel deviates from the usual and creates what is possibly the most captivating and thought-provoking post-apocalyptic novel you will ever read. The story hops around from the last day of the old world to 20 years later, following a number of characters based around Toronto. It is in the world of what becomes known as Year 20 that Mandel truly creates a unique future – no battling for resources, but a Travelling Symphony of musicians and actors who go from settlement to settlement performing Shakespeare plays.

That isn’t to say that Mandel’s world is a pastoral utopia – far from it. The main character, Kirsten, who was eight when the pandemic broke out and is now an actress with the Travelling Symphony, has wiped from her memory the horror of Year One as humanity descended into implied savagery. And while survivors have gathered in communities based around abandoned strip malls and old towns, there are still rapacious marauders and murderous prophets who believe they have been spared by God.

But Mandel’s message is that civilisation – and just as importantly, art – will endure as long as there is life. She tells us that when humanity’s back is against the wall, decency will emerge. Mandel has a beautiful writing style and the chapters preceding the apocalypse (the book jumps around in time) show an assured handle on human emotions and relationships, particularly those sequences involving Arthur Leander, an actor who dies on the night of the pandemic yet who casts a long shadow, even 20 years on.

Though not without tension and a sense of horror, Station Eleven rises above the bleakness of the usual post-apocalyptic novels because its central concept is one so rarely offered in the genre – hope.

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Station Eleven Is a Profound Television Experience

I know what you’re going to say about Station Eleven , and I get it. After nearly two years of living through a pandemic in real life, the last thing you want to do is watch a show about a pandemic.

But here’s the thing, and I say this with the utmost respect and love: You are wrong. Station Eleven , an adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s superb, unexpectedly prescient 2014 novel , is a limited series you should see, not despite the stress we’ve endured in 2020 and 2021 but because of it. Created by Patrick Somerville, whose past credits include Made for Love , Maniac, and, most tellingly, The Leftovers , Station Eleven is a beautifully wrought piece of storytelling that will certainly remind audiences of the coronavirus — it focuses on a flu that spreads rapidly, causing panic, quarantining, and an immense loss of life — but it also presents a much more extreme version of a pandemic than the one we’ve confronted.

The sickness in this HBO Max series, whose first three episodes drop on Thursday, instantly starts taking out humans and basic infrastructure to such an extent that it seems non-hyperbolic when it is referred to as “the end of the world.” (Audio from a television broadcast notes that the survival rate with this flu is one in 1,000 and that Chicago, where the series is initially set, “is not Chicago anymore. It’s just 2.5 million bodies.”) Yet Station Eleven is, at its core, an uplifting reaffirmation of the value of life and human connection that argues that Americans can and will come together to help one another in the most dire of circumstances.

Somerville and his fellow writers have done a very smart job of interpreting Mandel’s work, keeping key elements, excising others, and reshaping the narrative to make this series function as both a postapocalyptic account and commentary on the role art plays in sustaining and fortifying the human spirit during times of crisis. Given the involvement of Somerville and executive producer–writer Nick Cuse, another alum of The Leftovers , it’s not surprising that the tone of Station Eleven feels of a piece with that HBO drama, another moving portrait of what happens in the aftermath of a tragedy. Like The Leftovers , Station Eleven doesn’t spend any time attempting to explain its catalytic event — we never learn exactly how this flu spread so quickly or why it could not be contained. These ten episodes are much more interested in how human beings cope when they try to go on after losing nearly everyone they love and everything that once was familiar.

The series opens in more or less the same way the novel does, with actor Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) collapsing onstage in the middle of a production of King Lear . Jeevan (Himesh Patel), an audience member, is one of the first to recognize what is happening to Arthur — and the only person in the ensuing chaos to take one of the young members of the cast, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), under his wing and help her get home from the theater. Unfortunately, the concept of home fundamentally changes overnight as the contagion and news about it spreads, leading Jeevan and his brother, Frank (Nabhaan Rizwan), to become Kirsten’s guardians.

Station Eleven slides in all directions on its x-y-axis, moving forward in time 20 years, when we find the adult Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) on the road with a roving band of actors and musicians known as the Traveling Symphony, and back again to the earliest days of the outbreak as well as to events that occurred before it. A number of shows this year have tried, with varied success, to adopt a similar time-jumping structure, but few have managed it with the sense of purpose and elegance that Station Eleven does. In the two years we’ve spent living with COVID, most of us have learned that our sense of time gets incredibly skewed during a pandemic. Days, months, and years blur together. They do too in Station Eleven , in which images of a barely occupied, overgrown Chicago two decades in the future are folded into moments when the flu has just begun and the city still looks normal. Dialogue from conversations that took place years earlier bleed into what is happening in 2040.

Even though there is a hard dividing line between pre- and post-pandemic life, the series emphasizes that history still finds a way to repeat itself and creep into the present even when we think it’s all been packed away. All four of the series’ directors — Hiro Murai, Jeremy Podeswa, Helen Shaver, and Lucy Tcherniak — lean into that overlapping, almost dreamy quality without sacrificing the stark realities of what’s involved in surviving without modern resources.

The scope also expands to focus on multiple figures within its massive ensemble, including Clark (David Wilmot), a friend of Arthur’s who is traveling to retrieve his body when all hell breaks loose; Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald), an actress with whom Arthur has a child and who eventually becomes connected to Clark; the Conductor (Lori Petty), the outspoken, quietly heartbroken leader of the Symphony; Alex (Philippine Velge), a member of the troupe who has more or less been raised by Kirsten; and Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthur’s ex-wife who wrote, illustrated, and self-published a graphic novel called Station Eleven . Text from Miranda’s comic, which was passed on to young Kirsten in the early days of the pandemic, echoes throughout the episodes as though its verses are biblical. “I remember damage” is a line uttered more than once; “I don’t want to live the wrong life and then die” is another. While these quotes come from the graphic novel, they resonate strongly with what the characters in the series are experiencing, a reflection of how fiction and art can feel as though they’ve been tailored specifically to the present and the contours of one’s own private heart.

This is a theme the series touches upon over and over again — when the Symphony’s actors find transcendence through Shakespeare, or Frank busts out a rap he spent days working on, or young Kirsten softly, but not without joy, sings “The First Noel” at a particularly bleak turning point a few days before Christmas. (All of the performances in this series are excellent, but I can’t say enough about what a grounded and pure presence Lawler is here. She’s just extraordinary and makes an entirely believable 1.0 version of Davis.) Music, theater, and literature can provide both an escape from our circumstances and a way of processing them that becomes forever intertwined with those circumstances. Nothing illustrates that more effectively than the comic Station Eleven and the way Kirsten treasures it as both a tether to the before times and a means of shedding the shackles of time altogether. “Arthur gave me Station Eleven ,” the elder Kirsten explains in episode eight. “And when I read it, it didn’t matter that the world was ending. Because it was the world.”

The fact that Kirsten and others derive such pleasure and meaning from Station Eleven , the graphic novel, during a pandemic becomes even more profound when one realizes that Station Eleven , the HBO Max adaptation, does something similar for us during our own pandemic. Our world isn’t ending even though COVID is still a presence in it. But when you watch Station Eleven and become immersed in it, it really does become the whole wide world. What a gift.

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EW book review: Station Eleven , by Emily St. John Mandel

Karen is a Senior Writer for EW

Perhaps the very idea of another postapocalyptic tale exhausts you, but do stay, linger for a bit. Emily St. John Mandel’s tender and lovely new novel, Station Eleven , indeed begins when the world as we know it ends. Mandel anchors her book with the collapse of aging Hollywood actor Arthur Leander, who suffers a heart attack during a production of King Lear . As colleagues gather to raise a glass in the man’s honor, the author delivers a great slap of dread: ”Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

Within weeks, the Georgia flu, an insidiously efficient virus born in Eastern Europe and blown across the globe like a poisonous kiss, has wiped out 99 percent of the population. Mandel devotes an excruciatingly forlorn seven paragraphs to humanity’s ”incomplete list” of loss: no more cities, no more flight, no more police, no more electric guitars, no more social media. It’s what remains of a broken world that fuels a novel that miraculously reads like equal parts page-turner and poem.

One of her great feats is that the story feels spun rather than plotted, with seamless shifts in time and characters. Here, a young Arthur’s fateful meeting with his first wife. Then, a Michigan airport where stranded passengers cluster in huddles of horror beneath screens showing CNN. Now, a resolute band of actors whose caravan roams between dystopian settlements performing Shakespeare and Beethoven. ”Because survival is insufficient,” reads a line taken from Star Trek spray-painted on the Traveling Symphony’s lead wagon. The genius of Mandel’s fourth novel—the first with the marketing muscle of a major publisher—is that she lives up to those words. This is not a story of crisis and survival. It’s one of art and family and memory and community and the awful courage it takes to look upon the world with fresh and hopeful eyes. A

clock This article was published more than 4 years ago

Emily St. John Mandel’s ‘Station Eleven’ was a huge hit. Now she’s back with a different apocalypse.

Bad timing: Emily St. John Mandel is releasing a novel in the middle of a pandemic that has shuttered libraries and bookstores across the country.

At least Mandel knows what she’s getting into. Her previous novel, “ Station Eleven ,” described the world decimated by a deadly virus. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and a finalist for a National Book Award, “Station Eleven” was terrifically successful when it appeared in 2014, and this month it’s showing up on everybody’s grim coronavirus reading lists .

But don’t let that dystopian classic overshadow her new novel, “ The Glass Hotel .” In this story, Mandel focuses on a different kind of apocalypse: Her inspiration is Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme. The real pathogen this time around is deceit. Everyone in these pages is eager to wash their hands of culpability, but the wreckage keeps spreading, infecting an ever-widening group of friends and colleagues.

“The Glass Hotel” may be the perfect novel for your survival bunker. It remains freshly mysterious despite its self-spoiling plot. Mandel is always casually revealing future turns of success or demise in ways that only pique our curiosity. Indeed, the fate of the story’s heroine appears in a brief, impressionistic preface, but you won’t fully appreciate that opening until you finish the whole novel and begin obsessively reading it again.

Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel: Resistance is futile

Told in a relentless stream of disclosure, the story swirls around two troubled siblings, an addict named Paul and his “absurdly gorgeous” half sister, Vincent. Though never particularly close, they find themselves working together in a remote five-star resort on Vancouver Island. Beyond the reach of cellphones, accessible only by boat, the luxurious Hotel Caiette is a “glass-and-cedar palace” at the water’s edge, with ancient trees closing in. An ominous mix of opulence and dread is heightened early one morning when a phrase appears written in acid across a window in the lobby: “ Why don’t you swallow broken glass .”

As graffiti, that’s weird and threatening, like some freebie Jenny Holzer. The phrase alters the entire ambiance of the hotel. “The forest outside seemed newly dark,” Mandel writes, “the shadows dense and freighted with menace.” Staring at the window, the night manager realizes with a shudder that someone must have crept out into the woods and written those words onto the glass backward. The determination implicit in such an odd act of vandalism only unsettles him more.

But the arrival of the hotel’s wealthy owner, Jonathan Alkaitis, immediately distracts everyone from the graffiti. Indeed, this is a novel constantly testing our attention to details. A baleful fog moves across all these chapters, as the story drifts from one character to another. Alkaitis is a charming investment wizard who always makes time for new friends. When he falls for Vincent, she trades her bartending job at the hotel for the life of a trophy wife in New York City. “She had studied the habits of the moneyed with diligence,” Mandel writes. “She copied their modes of dress and speech, and cultivated an air of carelessness.” She may not feel any particular passion for Alkaitis, who is 34 years her senior, but she’s a dutiful chameleon, adaptable to the requirements of any social or romantic situation. That may sound like the requirements of a much older profession, but Vincent rationalizes away that unseemly thought. “Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real,” she asks herself, “whatever real means?”

Mandel is a consummate, almost profligate world builder. One superbly developed setting gives way to the next, as her attention winds from character to character, resting long enough to explore the peculiar mechanics of each life before slipping over to the next. From the woodland hotel, she moves to New York City, where she delves into the fraudulent maneuvers of high finance — a candy castle spun from the sugary strands of avarice.

That Mandel manages to cover so much, so deeply is the abiding mystery of this book. The 300 pages of “The Glass Hotel” work harder than most 600-page novels. When she turns to the art world, to a federal prison, to an international cargo ship, each realm rises out of the dark waters of her imagination with just as much substance as that hotel on the shore of Vancouver Island. The disappointment of leaving one story is immediately quelled by our fascination in the next.

No one character moves through all these places, but what binds the novel is its focus on the human capacity for self-delusion, particularly with regards to our own innocence. Rare, fortunately, is the moral idiot who can boast, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” The complex, troubled people who inhabit Mandel’s novel are vexed and haunted by their failings, driven to create ever more pleasant reflections of themselves in the glass.

Ron Charles writes about books for The Washington Post and hosts TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com .

Laura Zigman’s ‘Separation Anxiety’ tackles middle-aged loneliness with a perfect mix of grief and humor

Lily King’s ‘Writers & Lovers’ delivers pure joy

Oprah refused to cancel her ‘American Dirt’ show — and reminded us what civil discourse looks like

The Glass Hotel

By Emily St. John Mandel

Knopf. 301 pp. $26.95

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BookBrowse Reviews Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

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Emily Mandel's fourth novel is a wholly believable dystopia in which 99% of the population has been wiped out by a pandemic.

Station Eleven made big waves in 2014. It was a National Book Award finalist and made it into our Best of the Year issue before we even got a chance to review it. Although we are a little late to the party, it is well worth taking a look at a novel that has struck such a chord with so many readers. Dystopian stories have been hugely popular recently (see ' Beyond the Book '), but this one in particular marks a successful combination of an authentic speculative vision of the future and imagined nostalgia for all we are lucky to have now. The novel opens with a performance of King Lear at Toronto's Elgin Theatre. The lead role is played by 51-year-old Arthur Leander, who after years in Hollywood and several failed marriages is returning to his Canadian roots. During Act Four, Arthur suffers a heart attack and dies onstage, despite the ministrations of paparazzo-turned-paramedic Jeevan Chaudhary. Kirsten Raymonde, a child actor in this experimental production, had become particularly close with Arthur, and Jeevan tries to comfort her once he realizes CPR is futile. As Jeevan leaves the theatre to visit his wheelchair-bound brother Frank, an Afghanistan war veteran, he gets a call from a doctor friend at the local hospital, warning him that the Georgia Flu is turning into a full-scale epidemic. Jeevan buys seven shopping carts' worth of supplies and holes up in his brother's twenty-second floor apartment, even though most people probably think he is crazy for believing the rumors. It turns out this decision saves his life. The chilling final lines of Chapter 2 foreshadow the flu's growth into a pandemic that kills 99% of the global population: "Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city." Technology fails: all planes are grounded, and the Internet goes dark. One of the most striking passages of the entire novel is a litany of everything lost in the collapse: "No more ballgames played out under floodlights…No more cities. No more films…No more pharmaceuticals…No more fire departments, no more police." Fast forward to Year 20: Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony, bringing Shakespeare to the Lake Michigan region. "People want what was best about the world," a friend observes, and, for the members of the Symphony at least, Shakespeare is the pinnacle of literary achievement. Even after the apocalypse, art endures. However, life is precarious for this band of actors and musicians. At their next stop they are warned about a prophet and urged to leave town. Yet Kirsten is desperate to learn what happened to her friend Charlotte, who was pregnant when she left town two years ago with her partner. There are rumors of a settlement at the Museum of Civilization at Severn City airport, so the symphony heads that way. Mandel alternates between the present and the pre-collapse past, exploring Arthur's history and showing how traces of him are still alive today. Kirsten collects gossip magazines and books related to Arthur, and her most prized possession is the graphic novel series Station Eleven , created by Arthur's ex-wife, Miranda. In this story-within-the-story, the Undersea colonists reflect the ennui of pre-collapse humanity: "They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin." Lines from the Station Eleven comic strip weave through this novel as a kind of commentary on the loss of normal life: "I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth." Is the meager human population a chosen remnant? Does everything happen for a reason? This mysterious prophet they keep hearing about thinks so, and as we gradually learn his backstory we understand why. Mandel reveals satisfying connections between the storylines, but I was somewhat disappointed with Jeevan's reduced role in the rest of the novel. Although I sometimes wondered whether all the time switches and subplots were essential – Arthur's love life and professional ups and downs can seem dull – Mandel manages it all with aplomb, as a theatre director in her own right. My only other criticism is that a book so reliant on comics should include some illustrations. "Hell is the absence of the people you long for." Everyone in the post-collapse world has lost someone; most have lost entire families, friends and lovers. Still, somehow, art persists – stories, drawings, music, and even Shakespearean language. "What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty." Mandel reminds readers to be grateful for all we possess and warns us how fragile this seemingly impervious technology-driven life actually is.

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Station Eleven

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The captivating story that has spread far and wide, Station Eleven is set in an all-too-real pandemic that has pushed civilization to the edge. Past and present vie for your focus as the intertwining narratives, expertly woven by Emily St. John Mandel, crecendo into a masterpiece that defies genre.

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Mandel is an able and exuberant storyteller, and many readers will be won over by her nimble interweaving of her characters' lives and fates… Station Eleven is as much a mystery as it is a post-apocalyptic tale, and Mandel is especially good at planting clues and raising the kind of plot-thickening questions that keep the reader turning pages…If Station Eleven reveals little insight into the effects of extreme terror and misery on humanity, it offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and that when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.

A National Book Award Finalist • A PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist • One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Buzzfeed, and Entertainment Weekly, Time, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Minnesota Public Radio , The Huffington Post , BookPage, Time Out, BookRiot “ Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn’t have put it down for anything.” —Ann Patchett “A superb novel . . . [that] leaves us not fearful for the end of the word but appreciative of the grace of everyday existence.” — San Francisco Chronicle “Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to.” —George R. R. Martin “Absolutely extraordinary.” —Erin Morgenstern, author of The Night Circus “Darkly lyrical. . . . A truly haunting book, one that is hard to put down." — The Seattle Times “Tender and lovely. . . . Equal parts page-turner and poem.”— Entertainment Weekly “Mesmerizing.” — People “Mandel delivers a beautifully observed walk through her book’s 21st century world…. I kept putting the book down, looking around me, and thinking, ‘Everything is a miracle.’”—Matt Thompson, NPR “Magnificent.” — Booklist “My book of the year.”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves “Unmissable. . . . A literary page-turner, impeccably paced, which celebrates the world lost.” — Vulture “Haunting and riveting.”— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “ Station Eleven is the kind of book that speaks to dozens of the readers in me—the Hollywood devotee, the comic book fan, the cult junkie, the love lover, the disaster tourist. It is a brilliant novel, and Emily St. John Mandel is astonishing.” —Emma Straub, author of The Vacationers “Think of Cormac McCarthy seesawing with Joan Didion. . . . Magnetic.” — Kirkus (starred) “Even if you think dystopian fiction is not your thing, I urge you to give this marvelous novel a try. . . . [An] emotional and thoughtful story.” —Deborah Harkness, author of The Book of Life “It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment. Station Eleven, if we were to talk about it in our usual way, would seem like a book that combines high culture and low culture—“literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” But those categories aren’t really adequate to describe the book” — The New Yorker “Audacious. . . . A book about gratitude, about life right now, if we can live to look back on it." — Minneapolis Star-Tribune “A surprisingly beautiful story of human relationships amid devastation.” — The Washington Post “Soul-quaking. . . . Mandel displays the impressive skill of evoking both terror and empathy.” — Los Angeles Review of Books “A genuinely unsettling dystopian novel that also allows for moments of great tenderness. Emily St. John Mandel conjures indelible visuals, and her writing is pure elegance.” —Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers “Possibly the most captivating and thought-provoking post-apocalyptic novel you will ever read.” — The Independent (London) “A firework of a novel . . . full of life and humanity and the aftershock of memory.” —Lauren Beukes, author of The Shining Girls “One of the best things I’ve read on the ability of art to endure in a good long while.” —Tobias Carroll, Electric Literature “Will change the post-apocalyptic genre. . . . This isn’t a story about survival, it’s a story about living.” — Boston Herald “A big, brilliant, ambitious, genre-bending novel. . . . Hands-down one of my favorite books of the year.” —Sarah McCarry, Tor.com “Strange, poetic, thrilling, and grim all at once, Station Eleven is a prismatic tale about survival, unexpected coincidences, and the significance of art.” — Bustle, “Best Book of the Month” “Disturbing, inventive and exciting, Station Eleven left me wistful for a world where I still live.” —Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist

It’s hard to imagine a novel more perfectly suited, in both form and content, to this literary moment.

A novel that carries a magnificent depth. . . . It’s a sweeping look at where we are, how we got here and where we might go. While her previous novels are cracking good reads, this is her best yet.

Deeply melancholy, but beautifully written, and wonderfully elegiac. . . . A book that I will long remember, and return to.

Gracefully written and suspenseful. . . . Its evocation of the collapse of our civilization is powerful.

Station Eleven is so compelling, so fearlessly imagined, that I wouldn’t have put it down for anything.

In this haunting production, 80 percent of the world's population has been wiped out by a global pandemic. But that still leaves plenty of surviving characters to be brought to life by the versatile Kirsten Potter. The story could be confusing as it continually shifts between scenes before and after the outbreak of the devastating Georgia flu. Principal characters are fading actor Arthur Leander and those whose lives he has touched, for better or worse. Potter ensures that listeners keep the time frames straight and skillfully uses pacing and tone to differentiate the many personalities. She’s a riveting guide, equally adept at voicing women and men, young and old. Thanks to author and narrator, this production succeeds at being both bleak and yet hopeful. D.E.M. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

Excerpted from "Station Eleven" by . Copyright © 2015 Emily St. John Mandel. Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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O.K., Now It’s Time to Panic

By Janet Maslin

Oct. 30, 2014
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Happy Halloween from the National Book Foundation, which has chosen Emily St. John Mandel’s “Station Eleven” as one of its nominees for the 2014 National Book Award in fiction. Ms. Mandel has a very timely idea of what is frightening. She envisions a strain of flu that originates in the Republic of Georgia and has the capacity to wipe out the population of Planet Earth. Most of this novel unfolds after the Georgia flu has very nearly done that.

“Station Eleven” gets off to a spine-tingling start. A Shakespearean troupe in Toronto is performing “King Lear” when the leading man, a onetime matinee idol named Arthur Leander, starts behaving strangely. He confuses his lines. He seems not to know what scene he’s in. His voice turns wheezy. In almost no time, he collapses and dies.

There is an uneasy post-mortem gathering at the bar in the lobby, where those who have not fled the theater in terror stick around to discuss the tabloid history of Arthur’s marriages and divorces. And then Ms. Mandel lowers the boom, wrapping up what is truly a killer prologue. “Of all of them at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.”

That road is not the usual dusty, corpse-littered path through apocalypse country. Ms. Mandel’s vision of a plague-devastated world is a lot less grim than most. It is not “like those disaster movies,” even though the book invokes them in all their hokey glory: “This silent landscape. Snow and stopped cars with terrible things in them. Stepping over corpses. ... The road was all travelers walking with shellshocked expressions, children wearing blankets over their coats, people getting killed for the contents of their backpacks, hungry dogs.” It’s clearly the ambition of “Station Eleven” to leave this schlock to the hacks who produce it. But it’s less clear what Ms. Mandel wants to do instead.

“Station Eleven” does a lot of time-shuffling, so that only part of it is set in the dismal future. A lot of Arthur’s movie-star life is recapitulated, particularly his romance with Miranda, a talented artist who seems to write unusually good comic books. By a roll of the dice, Station Eleven, a space outpost she invented, winds up being remembered 15 years after civilized life has come to an end.

Jigsawing her plot pieces together, Ms. Mandel also introduces a paramedic-paparazzo — yes, that’s an unusual résumé — named Jeevan, who stations himself outside Miranda and Arthur’s house six nights a week, hoping to see something awful transpire. This novel puts emphases on perspective and scale, knowing that there are people who might view a highly publicized marital mess and a mass human catastrophe as not that different, headline-wise.

Then there is the twee idea of a traveling troupe of actors and orchestral musicians that roams the land. What, you might ask, has kept them afloat in the long years since food, water and audience members became scarce? And why haven’t the apocalypse’s scattered survivors created improvisational art that is more reflective of their current circumstances? Those questions are not addressed: The actors and musicians travel what they know is a safe route on which nobody will shoot at them. And they are sufficiently connected to people from the opening “Lear” sequence to carry totems of that lost theatrical world.

Ms. Mandel does address the fact that Shakespeare, too, knew pestilence. But once again, she illustrates the difference between including details and making good use of them. Another red herring straggling through the wreckage is some kind of prophet, who turns out to be about as uninteresting as a cult leader can be and serves no serious purpose. Beyond illustrating that the survivors, after years on their own, are independently beginning to wish they had something or someone to believe in, he’s little more than a good-versus-evil confrontation waiting to happen.

“Station Eleven” does have more warmth than stories of mass annihilation usually do. And some of its characters are sufficiently well drawn to elicit pity, since they don’t have much to look forward to. The main goal anyone in this book can imagine is finding a rumored human outpost at an airport, where some signs of past civilization have survived as museum artifacts, and the survivors can look at dead iPhones and marvel that life ever revolved around such gizmos. One of Ms. Mandel’s more ingenious flourishes is to give the youngest stragglers memories not of people but of the marvels electricity wrought: Imagine a refrigerator that would light up and release cold air!

Ms. Mandel gives the book some extra drama by positioning some of her characters near the brink of self-discovery as disaster approaches. The plague hits so fast that it takes them all by surprise. But a couple of those in Arthur’s set have just begun to look at themselves differently and make life-altering changes in their professional and personal lives. Thus Ms. Mandel is able to tap into the poignancy of lives cut short at a terrible time — or, in one case, of a life that goes on long after wrongs could be righted. In either case, hope seemingly has no place in this book’s overall scenario.

Yet, ultimately, “Station Eleven” isn’t very tough. And its biggest scares come early, without much follow-through. No doubt the author’s lack of interest in eliciting conventional responses helps explain her National Book Award nomination, but this is not one of the year’s bolder or more soul-plumbing books. Pandemics ought to be a little less pleasant.

STATION ELEVEN

By Emily St. John Mandel

333 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

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Sep 18, 2023

Review: Station Eleven

Updated: Feb 26

Re-read of Station Eleven , by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)

I first read this book in 2017, when the realities of a worldwide pandemic still felt like sci-fi (maybe not to a lot of scientists and epidemiologists, but to me, at least). I've been wanting to re-read it in today's world, where we know what's possible.

In Station Eleven , a highly contagious and fast-acting virus effectively causes the complete collapse of civilization. So many people perish (99.6%) that, for those that survive, it can feel like they're the only ones left, at least in the first few weeks and months after the collapse. Soon, though, people begin to find each other and establish small settlements. Or, like one of the protagonists, Kirsten, join a group of wandering musicians and actors, collectively called The Traveling Symphony, that brings music and Shakespearean plays to the communities it travels between.

The narrative volleys back and forth in time, with "day 1" being the first day the pandemic arrives in Toronto, Canada, where young Kirsten is acting in a performance of King Lear. The marquee actor, Arthur Leander, dies of a heart attack on stage. A EMT trainee from the audience named Jeevan leaps on stage to perform CPR. From there, we follow Kirsten, Jeevan, and Arthur's multiple ex-wives and son through the pandemic all the way to "year 20," as well as learning of their pasts (in particular, Arthur's past and how he met his wives). The past and present are blended together seamlessly, as many characters from the past begin to cross paths in the burnt out, terrifying version of North America. Amid all this, Kirsten encounters a man who calls himself simply, The Prophet - a man who has amassed a cult following, and terrorizes communities into submission. She soon finds that she and The Prophet have something very specific in common from the pre-pandemic world.

I don't know if it was more meaningful than when I read it in 2017, but I do think it hit closer to home. This book obviously shows a much more extreme version of a pandemic than the one we witnessed (and continue to grapple with). But in 2017, it was pure supposition to me, whereas in 2023... I get it. I get how rapidly things can fall apart - the panic, the bulk purchasing, the every-man-for-himself mentality, the denial, the hospitals filling up. I get that if Covid-19 had been even more contagious, rapid, and deadly, we might be right where Kirsten and the other 4% of survivors find themselves in Station Eleven . I also see the humanity that shines through, and the belief that communities can reform, creating families of people who care for each other.

This is one of the very few post-apocolyptic books that I really loved. It was clever and thoughtful and haunting. Station Eleven feels realistic in both its portrayals of the chaos and violence of collapse, as well as the strength of character that continues to create community, art, and hope amidst it.

Highly recommend! I don't know much about the TV show based on this book. I've heard mixed reviews, and I think I like the book too much to risk ruining it for myself.

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What are ‘the Kids’ Thinking These Days? Honor Levy Aims to Tell in ‘My First Book’

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A blue book cover with pixelated lettering like an old-fashioned computer.

What are the kids thinking these days? That seems be to the question behind the publication of My First Book , the buzzy debut story collection by Honor Levy.

The 26-year-old writer was the subject of a viral profile in The Cut earlier this month, in which she described the praise she received for her story “Good Boys” on The New Yorker website as “not undeserved” and demurred when asked whether she’s the voice of her generation. Social media discourse and the inevitable backlash aside, Levy’s first book is an amusing, if uneven, take on growing up white, privileged and Gen Z, the first generation to completely be born after the existence of the internet.

Readers won’t find meticulously plotted story arcs, fleshed-out characters, emotional epiphanies, or any other earmarks of conventional literary fiction. Most of Levy’s stories run fewer than 12 pages and feel like very long flash fiction, written in a voice dense with the chaotic patois of the internet. In her strongest stories, Levy channels the blitzkrieg of contradictory micro-observations we absorb from social media, video games, and doomscrolling to create the absurd, incomprehensible cacophony that anyone born after 1997 had to grow up enduring. These stories seem to ask: How can anyone expect a well-adjusted adult to rise from all this noise?

In “Internet Girl,” the main character is 11 and very online, and Levy’s portrayal of her narrator’s interiority is both compellingly satirical and frighteningly plausible. She writes:

It’s 2008, and my dad gets laid off and everything is happening all at once. All at once, there are two girls and one cup and planes hitting towers and a webcam looking at me and me smiling into it and a man and a boy and a love and a stranger on the other end. All at once, there are a million videos to watch and a million more to make. All at once it’s all at once. It’s beginning and ending all at once all the time. I’m twenty-one. I’m eleven. I’m on the internet. I’m twenty-one.

Another strong piece is “Love Story,” the collection’s opener, which is about a boy and a girl having an online relationship that seems to consist entirely of texting and sending pics of their bodies to each other. Levy poignantly captures the girl’s vulnerability. “Little girl lost can’t even find herself,” Levy writes. “Pictures of her naked body are out there everywhere, in the cloud floating, and under the sea, coursing through cables in the dark. It’s so dark.”

Levy smartly skewers late capitalism in “Halloween Forever,” about a young woman trying to survive a surreal and drug-filled Halloween night in Brooklyn. She meets a “boy from Stanford dressed as a cowboy,” who, when sufficiently coked-up, muses about the romance of the Wild West and how “The West was freedom … just like the internet originally was!” The narrator is skeptical:

Freedom is the stuff of dreams and nightmares only and our free market doesn’t make us free people, but the cowboy doesn’t care. Silicon Valley must have burrowed itself deep into his brain underneath that hat. He is probably afraid of blood, or social media, or something stupid. My drink is seventeen dollars.

As the collection progresses, the unique blend of the satirical and the poignant gives way to a more essayistic approach to storytelling. In “Cancel Me,” which is about cancel culture, the characters — a young woman and two “Ivy League boys with kitten-sharp teeth and Accutane-skin,” all of whom have experienced cancellation for murky reasons — gradually fade into a series of observations about wokeness that aren’t much different or more insightful than what one might find on X or Reddit.

“Z Was For Zoomer,” which runs more than 50 pages, seems to be a continuation of “Cancel Me,” except the two male “edgelords” — someone on an internet forum who deliberately posts about controversial or taboo topics to appear edgy — are named Gideon and Ivan instead of Jack and Roger. Just as in “Cancel Me,” the narrator’s relationship with the men is never defined and doesn’t progress. Character-driven narrative takes a back seat to dashed-off, inch-deep lines like “Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but you still can’t leave.”

It should also be mentioned that these stories won’t pass the most permissive of racial Bechdel tests. The number of non-white references in this 200-page book won’t go past one hand, unless you count the few references to anime and the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. The milieu of Honor Levy’s fiction is undeniably white and privileged, but her best stories exaggerate that milieu to great satirical effect. Perhaps her second book will contain more of them.

Leland Cheuk is an award-winning author of three books of fiction, including the latest “No Good Very Bad Asian.’ His writing has appeared in ‘The Washington Post,’ ‘The Boston Globe,’ ‘San Francisco Chronicle,’ and ‘Salon,’ among other outlets.

‘My First Book’ by Honor Levy (Penguin Press) is out on May 14, 2014.

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Childish Gambino announces first tour in 5 years, releases reimagined 2020 album with new songs

FILE - Donald Glover, who goes by the stage name Childish Gambino, performs at the Governors Ball Music Festival in New York on June 3, 2017. Childish Gambino has returned with a reimagined album and a new tour announcement. Early Monday morning, Glover posted on X that a new album, “ATAVISTA,” had hit streaming platforms. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Glover’s musical project Childish Gambino has returned with a reimagined album and a new tour announcement.

Early Monday, Glover posted on X that “ATAVISTA” had hit streaming platforms — and that the record is actually “the finished version” of an album he released in 2020, “3.15.20.”

On March 15, 2020, a number of new Childish Gambino songs dropped on DonaldGloverPresents.com , but were quickly removed. A week later, “3.15.20” was officially released with guest appearances including Ariana Grande , 21 Savage and others. It, too, was eventually removed from streaming platforms.

Monday’s full-length release includes two brand new tracks, “Atavista” and “Human Sacrifice,” according to a press release. Young Nudy and Summer Walker have new guest spots on the album.

To celebrate “Atavista,” Glover dropped a music video for “Little Foot Big Foot,” directed by Hiro Murai (his longtime collaborator also known for work on the television shows “Barry” and “Station Eleven”) and starring Quinta Brunson, Rob Bynes, Monyett Crump and others.

Glover has also announced “The New World Tour,” his first tour since 2019. His run begins on Aug. 11 in Oklahoma City and will hit many major North American cities before heading to Europe, the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.

The tour ends on Feb. 11, 2025 in Perth, Australia.

Openers include WILLOW ( Willow Smith’s musical moniker) and Amaarae . Tickets go on sale Friday.

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In "Station Eleven," All Art Is Adaptation
Katy Waldman reflects on the dynamics, and the similarities, of life and art as represented in "Station Eleven," the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel and the 2021 HBO Max adaptation.
'Station Eleven,' by Emily St. John Mandel
Sept. 12, 2014. Emily St. John Mandel's fourth novel, "Station Eleven," begins with a spectacular end. One night, in a Toronto theater, onstage performing the role of King Lear, 51-year-old ...
Review: In 'Station Eleven,' the World Ends, Beautifully
Review: In 'Station Eleven,' the World Ends, Beautifully. Don't let the pandemic premise chase you off. This is the most uplifting post-apocalyptic show you're likely to see. Himesh Patel ...
Finding Joy Through Art at the End of the World in 'Station Eleven
Todd Heisler/The New York Times. There's a scene in Emily St. John Mandel 's 2014 pandemic novel " Station Eleven " when people stranded inside a Midwestern airport realize that no one is ...
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York. She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.)
Station Eleven review
H ow deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. I read Emily St John Mandel's bestselling Station Eleven shortly ...
STATION ELEVEN
New York Times Bestseller. National Book Award Finalist. Survivors and victims of a pandemic populate this quietly ambitious take on a post-apocalyptic world where some strive to preserve art, culture and kindness. In her fourth novel, Mandel ( The Lola Quartet, 2012, etc.) moves away from the literary thriller form of her previous books but ...
Station Eleven review
A much-tipped novel about memory, art and survival after a flu pandemic wipes out 99% of humanity. Read Justine Jordan's gripping review of Station Eleven.
Review: Station Eleven
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel. New York: Knopf, 2014. Summary: An account of the end of civilization as we know it after a catastrophic pandemic, and how survivors sought to keep beauty and the memory of what was alive as they struggled against destructive forces to rebuild human society.
Station Eleven by Emily St John, book review: Hope amidst an
Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven follows the traditional route for wiping out much of humanity and re-setting the species's clock - a particularly virulent strain of influenza, the ...
Station Eleven: Limited Series
Katy Waldman New Yorker Even more than the book, the show is obsessed with how people change, remake, and imprint on the material they cherish. Dec 12, 2022 Full Review Dan Einav Financial Times ...
'Station Eleven' Review: A Profound Television Experience
A review of 'Station Eleven,' the series based on the novel by Emily St. John Mandel about a flu pandemic and its aftermath, streaming on HBO Max beginning December 16.
Review: 'Sea of Tranquility,' by Emily St. John Mandel
A Dazzling New Foray into Speculative Fiction From Emily St. John Mandel In "Station Eleven," she explored fallout from a pandemic. Now, in "Sea of Tranquility," Mandel takes up ...
EW book review: 'Station Eleven,' by Emily St. John Mandel
Perhaps the very idea of another postapocalyptic tale exhausts you, but do stay, linger for a bit. Emily St. John Mandel's tender and lovely new novel, Station Eleven, indeed begins when the ...
Review
From the woodland hotel, she moves to New York City, where she delves into the fraudulent maneuvers of high finance — a candy castle spun from the sugary strands of avarice.
Book Marks reviews of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
What The Reviewers Say. Never has a book convinced me more of society's looming demise than Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, an apocalyptic novel about a world just like our own that, much as our own might, dissolves after a new strain of influenza eradicates 99 percent of the human population …. Confronting the end of society and ...
Review of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Emily Mandel's fourth novel is a wholly believable dystopia in which 99% of the population has been wiped out by a pandemic. Station Eleven made big waves in 2014. It was a National Book Award finalist and made it into our Best of the Year issue before we even got a chance to review it. Although we are a little late to the party, it is well ...
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, David Manet
Station Eleven, if we were to talk about it in our usual way, would seem like a book that combines high culture and low culture—"literary fiction" and "genre fiction." But those categories aren't really adequate to describe the book" —The New Yorker "Audacious. . . .
Emily St. John Mandel's 'Station Eleven,' a Flu Apocalypse
A lot of Arthur's movie-star life is recapitulated, particularly his romance with Miranda, a talented artist who seems to write unusually good comic books. By a roll of the dice, Station Eleven ...
Review: Station Eleven
5/5 starsRe-read of Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel (2014)I first read this book in 2017, when the realities of a worldwide pandemic still felt like sci-fi (maybe not to a lot of scientists and epidemiologists, but to me, at least). I've been wanting to re-read it in today's world, where we know what's possible.In Station Eleven, a highly contagious and fast-acting virus effectively ...
All Book Marks reviews for Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Never has a book convinced me more of society's looming demise than Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, an apocalyptic novel about a world just like our own that, much as our own might, dissolves after a new strain of influenza eradicates 99 percent of the human population …. Confronting the end of society and recording it in a ...
'My First Book' Review: Honor Levy's Short Stories for Gen Z
'My First Book' by Honor Levy. (Penguin Press) What are the kids thinking these days? That seems be to the question behind the publication of My First Book, the buzzy debut story collection by Honor Levy.. The 26-year-old writer was the subject of a viral profile in The Cut earlier this month, in which she described the praise she received for her story "Good Boys" on The New Yorker ...
Childish Gambino announces first tour in 5 years, returns with
NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Glover's musical project Childish Gambino has returned with a reimagined album and a new tour announcement. Early Monday, Glover posted on X that "ATAVISTA" had hit streaming platforms — and that the record is actually "the finished version" of an album he released in 2020, "3.15.20.". On March 15, 2020, a number of new Childish Gambino songs dropped on ...

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What are ‘the Kids’ Thinking These Days? Honor Levy Aims to Tell in ‘My First Book’

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