Station Eleven: Survival Tips

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mendel intertwines the present world with one devastated by a plague, which wipes out 99% of the world’s population and where currency, electricity, and even twitter have fallen useless in the matter of hours. Mendel’s fourth book, and her best by far, is a National Book Award and a PEN/FAULKNER finalist. It jumps on the apocalyptic bandwagon that has controlled the Young-Adult genre for years and has since then crossed into the adult sector. She also plays into the ever-growing fear of the nearing global pandemic, in fact it’s the central theme. The fear angle worked on me seeing as I read the book on a rickety bus driving into the remote desert of a relatively unknown and underdeveloped Arab country known as Oman. Station Eleven got me thinking about how my situation would work out if the apocalypse happened at the moment, but otherwise the plotlines fell flat in Mandel’s vivid new world and I felt unattached to the characters in the overused backdrop.

An actor’s second ex-wife, his son, and his long-time best friend were all on the same flight on the day of the apocalypse, without him. They were flying to attend his funeral. There’s a girl who has been walking since the day of apocalypse: at first for survival, now performing Shakespeare and Bach in a troop called the Travelling Symphony. A man who witnessed the actor’s death the day before the apocalypse, and then hid with his paraphyletic brother as they watched the world end from their apartment. At the first introduction of the characters, I was intrigued to learn the connections and their solution for survival. Instead, I found the characters to be static and flat. The son was quiet and obsessive, the best friend was philosophical and patient, the girl was creative and inquisitive. Each was put in a box and by the end, they were still in that box.

A passage that stood out because it shows the complexity of both the syntax of her writing and the world that she created, started with, “The first winter in the Severn City Airport: There was a frisson of excitement on Day Two…” (242). Mandel uses unique syntax and sentence structure style. By bending the grammar rules with that first phrase, it sets everything up afterward to be a list of how the world has changed. Many of the chapters start off this way: not so much with plotline, but more of a list of in depth descriptions of differences between our world and the post-plague world. This style creates a world that readers can easily picture, but makes it easy to skim through large chunks of text in order to find actual plot.

Later in that same passage, Mandel describes a couple talking about twitter shortly after the catastrophe, “...his girlfriend said, wistful. ‘You know, like, ‘Not much, just chilling with Arthur Leaner’s kid at the end of the world’’” (242).  In just a simple sentence, Mandel gave readers a chilling reminder of how useless all of the popular social media platforms would be, no matter how powerful twitter is in 2015. Although, it’s a common theme found across the media and it makes an easy jab at the uselessness and pettiness of the rising generation. The apocalypse trope is an unoriginal way to scrutinize today’s society and reimagine one with a new set of problems; however, Mandel took her world to the next level with her creation of different societies, hierarchies, and economic systems.

The combination of flat characters, unending descriptive passages, and an exasperating trope left me uninterested in the general plotline of the novel, but I was still curious to find out how some characters survived. In my mind, I needed those survival tips as I was going deeper into the Empty Quarter. If the world ended then, I would be stuck with a very interesting group of people and I would never be able to talk to my family again. More importantly, we would never know that the world had ended. Mandel, through Station Eleven, sent me on a mission to figure out how I would find food and water in the Empty Quarter.
-Sophie Norton