Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. 2014: Alfred A. Knopf, New York. Kindle edition.
Station Eleven confirms my deeply held conviction that influenza will kill us all. It begins with an outbreak of the "Georgian flu," which is not only remarkably contagious, but finishes off the infected within 12-24 hours. And just like that, civilization is gone.
Or rather, almost all the people are gone. Civilization persists, particularly in the form of the Traveling Symphony, a company of musicians and actors which caravans from settlement to settlement around Lake Michigan performing orchestral pieces and the Shakespearean canon. Their motto, taken from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, is "Survival is insufficient." Or, as Mandel seems to be suggesting, survival has never been sufficient for the human species.
While Station Eleven kicks off with an apocalypse, it's far from a dystopian novel. Mandel uses Arthur Leander, a Canadian actor of some celebrity, to create the book's through-line: all the main characters are connected to him, even if in a minor way, although he dies of a heart attack just before the Georgian flu strikes. (No spoiler alert required: said cardiac event begins on the very first page.) Leander enables Mandel to move the narrative back and forward in time, and to introduce the titular "Station Eleven:" a self-published comic book by Leander's first wife which is itself set on a sort of ruined world. The Leander storyline is much more than a narrative device, however: it's a means by which Mandel can illustrate that human culture persists wherever humanity persists.
Life without running water, electricity, or any other features of post-18th century technology would be hard and uncomfortable. It would not, however, be a life without culture. That, at least in part, is the glory of humanity, which reflects the glory of the culture of the Trinity.
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