Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

I knew Emily St. John Mandel's 2014 apocalyptic bestseller Station Eleven well when I raced through it over three days in February 2015. My thoughts were ripe and I'm convinced my insights were brilliant. Then came judgment day, in October appropriately, when Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ tricked me into deleting my review because the book was still marked "to read" in my reading docket. Now I find myself struggling to pick up the pieces and recreate what was the best I can, without cannibals chasing me.

The story begins at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto, where a fading film star named Arthur Leander holds stage as the lead in King Lear. The actor collapses and in spite of efforts by a fast thinking paramedic trainee seated near the footlights named Jeevan Chaudhary, the actor dies. Shaken by the tragedy is one of Leander's co-stars, an adolescent named Kirsten Raymonde. Jeevan leaves the theater more elated than saddened, convinced that after years of unfulfilling work as a paparzzo, he's found his true calling.

Jeevan receives a phone call from a friend, a doctor at Toronto General Hospital. He reports that what the news media has labelled the Georgia Flu looks like a real epidemic and has come to North America, courtesy a flight from Moscow and a sixteen year old girl now in critical condition with flu-like symptoms. 200 patients have since presented at the hospital with the same symptoms, fifteen dead. Jeevan's friend calls back to tell Jeevan to get out of the city.

Jeevan instead heads to a supermarket and fills two shopping carts with provisions. He hunkers down in the high rise apartment of his wheelchair bound brother Frank. Meanwhile, Arthur Leander's attorney calls the actor's oldest friend, a corporate consultant named Clark Thompson, with news of the actor's death. It falls on Clark to phone each of Arthur's ex-wives, beginning with Miranda Carroll, a shipping company executive currently working in Malaysia.

Mandel slips back from the edge of the apocalypse to introduce us to Arthur as a young man in New York. Notified by family that someone who grew up with him in the same British Columbia town has moved to the city, Arthur has dinner with her. Miranda is introduced working a clerical position and trapped in a bad relationship with a painter. Miranda holds artistic aspirations of her own, spending every moment of her time working on a graphic novel about a physicist named Dr. Eleven orbiting the earth in a space platform consisting of small islands. It's a world Miranda calls Station Eleven.

Mranda's marriage to Arthur and their life in L.A. end badly, culminating in a night when Jeevan sneaks a photo of Miranda walking in the nocturne. Before the world can embrace Miranda's magnum opus, the Georgia Flu wipes out 99% of the world's population. One of the survivors is Kirsten, who falls in with a troupe of actors and musicians calling themselves the Traveling Symphony. Circling the Great Lakes region and singing for their supper one settlement at a time, Kirsten's skills with Shakespearean tragedy have been eclipsed only by her skill with a knife, and one of her most prized possessions are two issues of a comic book an old co-star gave her called Station Eleven.

The novel Station Eleven is one of the best post-apocalyptic novels I've read. I'd place it shoulder to shoulder with The Dog Stars by Peter Heller; The Stand by Stephen King towers above them both like Mount Doom by virtue of its imagination and size alone. I'm always a prospective customer when it comes to apocalyptic novels or tales of survivors, but Station Eleven moved some fresh air through the corridors. Mandel puts the word "fiction" in the "science fiction" category.

The "science" or action isn't skipped out on here. I have a two-step plan for surviving a zombie apocalypse, a call for action I've developed after reading a lot of apocalyptic novels, and step one of my plan is lifted directly from this novel. I learned more about how to survive the end of the world than I did reading I Am Legend or watching Will Smith hunt deer from a Ford Mustang for sure. Better still is Mandel's facility with language, which really elevates the book:

AN INCOMPLETE LIST:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while util the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

More more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position—but not, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runaways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were fled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plessetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.

Mandel's strength lies in "character" first and foremost, which Stephen King would probably endorse and I always value. It's a testament to her ability to create red blooded women and men, documenting their passions, their vulnerabilities and their will to live, that I didn't go to fidgeting during the chapters set before the Georgia Flu. I would've been fine with a novel about these characters without the end of the world at all.

The decision to use an unpubished graphic novel, nothing more to the characters than paper and ink by an unknown artist, to tie both of Mandel's eras together and say something about the things worth living and dying for, was something I don't usually find in these sorts of books where survivors are being chased by mutants. Maybe it's a testament to my love of Spaceman Spiff and Bill Watterson, but I found myself agreeing with Mandel and a bittersweet when the novel ended.