#send me all your mr. burns a post electric play-coded media

[cow-boy-caviar]

STATION ELEVEN by EMILY ST. JOHN MANDEL

I don’t want to come off too harshly on one of the best, most engrossing books I’ve read in a long time, but there’s finally enough material here to sink my teeth into, so forgive me if it sounds like I’m going for the main arteries on this beautiful beautiful book.

An overview: Station Eleven shifts forwards and backwards in time, tying a once-successful actor (Arthur) to half a dozen other people who outlive him and thus experience the global societal collapse resulting from a flu pandemic. Jeevan, the paparazzo turned paramedic who tries to save Arthur when he has a heart attack on stage; Kirsten, a child actor who witnesses Arthur’s death and goes on to become a premier Shakespeare actor after the collapse of everything; Miranda, Arthur’s first wife and creator of the Dr. Eleven graphic novels; Tyler, Arthur’s son by his second wife and the unnamed prophet of a zealous and violent cult; and Clark, Arthur’s best friend who miraculously survives the pandemic by living in an abandoned airport and curating a museum of items from a past not quite yet forgotten.

Throughout the book, the refrain “because survival is insufficient” echoes across each character, implicitly for most but explicitly for Kirsten and the other members of her troupe, the Traveling Symphony. Each character finds their community and their purpose beyond just surviving to the next day. For Clark, it means preserving past knowledge and technology for the generations born After. For Kirsten, it’s performing centuries-old texts that are no less relevant or moving in a time when electricity has come and gone. For Tyler, it’s looking for a reason why all this happened, and deciding that intelligent design means he was purposely saved. Each of them finds their purpose and their people (for better or worse) to keep them going in Year Twenty, because just getting by isn’t enough reason to stay alive.

This is not a new idea — I can dig up all the quotes I want here: Kirk on the Enterprise saying that humanity must keep moving forward (which I wrote my thesis on in the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic), or Mr. Keating telling his students that we stay alive for the things that are beautiful in life — but we don’t often see it in the context of the apocalypse. Post-apocalyptic media is about survival post-apocalypse. That is, unfortunately, a bit of what happens with Station Eleven as well. For a book that was billed to me as “theatre after the world ends,” there is remarkably little theatre and a whole lot of the world ending.

That being said, in the moments where there is theatre, it is gorgeous and it is the most important thing in that moment. My favorite scene (and of course it’s always my favorite scene that doesn’t get put in the screen adaptation, DM me for Dune dinner party discourse) is before the flu’s spread is known, before anyone besides Arthur has died. All the people at the bar are known only by their King Lear character names or their job title. (Goneril, the producer, the bartender, because that’s what they are to each other. I’m still “Trap Door” in one of my best friend’s contacts because I operated the trap in the first show we worked on together.) They’re all fretting about how the show will continue without Arthur, who to call, how to keep the negative press away from the show. The final paragraph of this chapter was a gut punch: all of these people and all of their very real worries and concerns are made instantly insignificant by the fact that all of them will be dead soon, and the one who lives the longest only lives three weeks. As someone who went from leaving rehearsal worrying if I could land a summer internship, to being back home wondering if my friends would die, it hit hard. All the priorities you could possibly imagine are reshuffled to “stay home, stay six feet apart, stay alive.”

I loved this novel. I devoured most of it in one sitting. Anyone who has had their life consumed by their art should read it. I almost wish it was spread out into a longer series. It’s incredible how many threads Mandel managed to tie together, but there were a handful that I thought would be picked up again: Miranda’s fleet off the coast of Malaysia; the New Petoskey newspaper; Jeevan’s connection to Kirsten, and by extension all of Arthur’s extended network. (But maybe because it’s the end of the world I’m looking for meaning in any interaction, maybe their connection isn’t meant to be something we return back to, because not every person you meet comes back, but then why include it in the narrative?) Some things we aren’t meant to know; I wouldn’t feel satisfied by any resolution for the flight that leaves Severn City Airport for LA around Day 100. Other things we don’t need to show; there is hope in knowing that Clark will recognize Kirsten’s paperweight as a gift he once gave to a friend 30 years ago, in a world that no longer exists, and we don’t need to see that scene to know it would bring both of them tremendous joy. But if we start with Jeevan, giving him a place of prominence in the narrative, I want to see him woven back in later on more than he is. There are perhaps too many characters — all of them full and beautifully drawn and distinct, I don’t want any of them gone — for one book alone. 

New pitch: expand all of their stories, make it a series, make it into a graphic novel that can spiral across this detailed and complete world. Mostly, I want to see the Traveling Symphony’s performance of Midsummer Nights Dream.