When I asked the editor (Pan Macmillan) through Netgalley for a copy of Station Eleven – in exchange of a honest review, as usual – I did it because of its cover. Which says: “DAY ONE The Georgia Flu explodes over the surface of the earth like a neutron bomb. News reports put the mortality rate at over 99%. WEEK TWO Civilization has crumbled. YEAR TWENTY A band of actors and musicians called the Travelling Symphony move through their territories performing concerts and Shakespeare to the settlements that have grown up there. Twenty years after the pandemic, life feels relatively safe. But now a new danger looms, and he threatens the hopeful world every survivor has tried to rebuild. STATION ELEVEN Moving backwards and forwards in time, from the glittering years just before the collapse to the strange and altered world that exists twenty years after.”
So, it was not far-fetched for me to believe this was something in the wide realm of SF – possibly a dystopian novel of the genre of The Road, right? Well, three (surprising) things happened after. First: I realised I was wrong. Emily St. John Mandel has not written SF, no matter how wide you can keep its boundaries. Second: she has written a dark, dystopian novel, but it’s certainly not the one you would imagine given its start. Third: SF or not, traditional dystopia or not, the book is well worth reading. I will try to explain why.
While it’
s true that Station Eleven puts on stage a mortal plague – compared to which the Black Death looks like a benign flu – that almost wipes out Earth’s civilisation, the book’s focus is elsewhere, as you realise pretty fast. In the first chapter there’s almost no description of the virus itself, or even of its ghastly effects. What you see is people dealing with it, in a way or in another. This is enough to raise suspicions about what follows: it won’t be what you expect. Right on cue: because from that moment on, you are lifted and landed twenty years later in the same country (US) but where airplanes are grounded, the world has collapsed, and you are more in the Middle Age than in the future. Yes, and now following a performing art group, that, to make things easier, has nothing to do with the characters you have met so far. You wonder what all this is about and why, exactly, you’re still reading it.
But that’s only the first impression. Slowly, in an elegant narrative style, switching back and forth in time, the author plunges you in a complex story populated by even more complex characters, all connected in a way or in another. And it draws you in.
There’s something important to say about Station Eleven: it is really, really beautifully written. Some critics have defined it “a literary work“, as if SF (here for speculative fiction) normally is not. Well, sorry guys, the fact SF has other priorities than experimenting with words and styles doesn’t mean it’s not literature. And good literature too. Just think about Samuel R. Delany or Ursula Le Guin – to keep the list short. But discussions of the kind aside, Emily St. John Mandel has a way with words, and she uses them as a master. I don’t agree either this is only another apocalyptic story, only better written than others. Apocalyptic, zombie-led, end-of-the-world stories are action, not character-driven: when it’s not the case, if they are not original (like World War Z, say) they are frankly boring. Station Eleven is all about characters, being people, roles played by actors (King Lear is a constant reference here) or comics (Dr. Eleven, the art project of one of the protagonists).
There is a leit-motiv in this fascinating story and it’s a Star Trek’s quote, repeated by different characters: survival is insufficient. This, and the plague, might well be the only hints of speculative fiction here. And yet, I found this book more deeply dystopian than many others. Its dark atmosphere, the anguish of its characters, the eerie desolation of the settings are so pervasive that kept haunting me after having put it down. They still do.