Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven has gotten a lot of attention during the pandemic for obvious reasons. I knew I wouldn't have been able to read Station Eleven early on in the pandemic, particularly in those first 9 months where little was known about coronavirus and vaccines were still another 6 months or so away (and it took quite a while after that for people in my age bracket to qualify!). It was easier to read Camus's The Plague as it was about a very different disease with different (and better known) vectors.
At any rate, now that life is gradually returning to something closer to normal, I was able to better appreciate the book. One striking features is that only a chapter or two in, she casually drops that the "Georgian flu" is so deadly that approximately 99% of humanity dies and society essentially collapses. This is basically the same territory as Corman McCarthy's The Road, though her vision isn't quite as apocalyptical. For the most part people retreat into small communities of survivors rather than becoming marauding bands, though there is one "prophet" who does violently impose his vision and rules. And of course one of the most notable aspects of the book is that there is a travelling group of musicians and actors that travel across the Midwest. There are some clear parallels to Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn, which did play in NYC in 2012 so Mandel might have come across it and been somewhat inspired by it, though most likely she had been well along in her own writing and this is just another case of parallel evolution. I actually passed on a chance to see Mr. Burns in Toronto and sometimes I regret not going, though it isn't a very deep regret. One of the core conceits is that they are putting on an old Simpson episode and the episode keeps getting distorted over the years, given that it isn't possible to watch the original. At least with Shakespeare (and Beethoven) there are texts to refer to, so the interpretations don't stray too far from the source, and it also helps that Station Eleven takes place only 20 years after the collapse and not 100 or even 500 years.
I will say that the book's structure fooled me a bit. I thought that the entire book took place post-pandemic, but in fact there are quite a few flashbacks that explain how Arthur (a movie star) is linked to the other characters, most but not all who are among the "lucky" 1% of survivors. I'd say by the end of the book a few of the coincidences were a bit strained, particularly the several ways that Jeevan keeps intersecting with Arthur. I'd also say that the sheer number of people connected to Arthur who survive is a bit implausible. I'd assume that, at minimum, Arthur's 2nd wife, would have been carried off long before.
I'm intrigued to find out that Station Eleven was turned into a miniseries for HBO Max (and that David Cross is one of the travelling actor-musicians!). I'm not at all sure I will watch it, but I might someday. I would definitely be interested just how much of the Station Eleven artwork they showed (and just how close it would come to Waterson's Spaceman Spiff!). Presumably they would need to show Miranda at work with her sketches and some of the finished pages. Also, given the way television tends to make a sequel of everything (and I am particularly thinking of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale where the tv sequel largely paved the way for Atwood to return to Gilead (figuratively speaking) and write The Testaments), I would not be at all surprised if they wanted to explore one of the major dropped threads in Station Eleven, namely that some 20 years after this devastating pandemic, some community had found a way to restore electricity! This interview in MacLean's touches very briefly on the filming of the miniseries but doesn't discuss any changes they made to the material, so it remains a bit of a mystery. However, Mandel does reveal that a pandemic also appears in her latest novel, Sea of Tranquility.
I don't really consider myself a survivalist, and I can't imagine what I would do under those circumstances where society had essentially collapsed, starting with whether I would eat rabbit and deer or would I try to stick to a vegetarian diet. I certainly hope it isn't something I really have to consider down the road. Despite a few too many coincidences and a somewhat stagey final conflict, Station Eleven was very entertaining and a fairly quick read, though I'm very glad I read this after the worst aspects of our real-world pandemic have started to fade (and that our pandemic was less than a tenth as deadly as the one Mandel cooked up)!
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