MAY - Station Eleven

May review for Eclectic Reader's Challenge 2016: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, 2014. [Disaster Fiction category]

When I read Station Eleven walking home from work one day, a girl passed me running the other direction. As she came abreast of me, she called, "Is that book any good? I want to read it!" She turned her head as she ran past for my answer, and I turned to walk backwards and call back to her that I loved it so far. Station Eleven elicited many such interactions with both friends and strangers whilst I read it, and it is one that I am looking forward to discussing. It is a book that makes you think, makes you imagine, makes you connect. My derby sister, Emilie, bought it for me for my birthday, one in a kick of post-apocalypse books she's devoured lately. I figured that a freak plague-driven-apocalypse certainly counted as disaster fiction, and hungrily added it to my Eclectic Reader list. {I will note that it's possible there are spoilers in this post, but it's hard to write about it without because the book offers its own spoilers as it moves from time to time, so it's not my fault this time!}

Station Eleven is about a lot of things. It is about a lot of times. The gist is that there was an inexplicable plague that sprang up and killed a significant chunk of the population, and the book bounces around between the night it began, the years before, and Years Since. There are a number of characters who serve as constellation points whose connections slowly come into focus as the story moves--well, not forward, due to the non-linear scattered-jigsaw way it is written, and it reminded me of Jennifer Egan's masterpiece A Visit From The Goon Squad in that way. I even drew up a character connections map, like I did for Goon Squad! (Yes, I'm a nerd, we all know this already.) The first thing Emilie asked me when I told her I'd finished was who my favorite character was, a surprisingly hard question! The two frontrunners were obviously Miranda, the shipping mogul ex-wife of an actor, and Kirsten, and the traveling actor survivalist, respectively. After much consideration, I think I rank Miranda as my #1, not solely because she was the author of the titular Station Eleven comic, but also because she epitomizes getting knocked down and standing back up again stronger--even if it means eventually ending up alone on a Malaysian beach at the end of the world wondering if that is all. I do love Kirsten, of course, as she is a survivor with a Star Trek tattoo ("Survival is Insufficient") and a player in the Shakespeare traveling theater company, but there was a way that she felt too distant from me for me to really mark her as my favorite. 

I think the reason this book resonated so much with me in the same way that Goon Squad  did is that it is primarily about people. The resilience of human souls when faced with the utter unknown, and how their failings and successes are equally important. I have been thinking a lot about resilience lately, albeit on a smaller scale than fight-or-flight having to survive a world-ending flu, and it is stories like this that remind me of how simple and beautiful resilience can be. Stories like this that remind me that I'm ok, and that I too can find and share and tell stories that will make others feel that they are ok, too.