I first read 'Station Eleven' for a course at uni that was concerned with breaking down the barrier between literary and 'genre' fiction. A lot of great books came out of that class ('Zone One' by Colson Whitehead, and 'Swamplandia!' by Karen Russell to name just two others), and this was definitely one of them.

At the time I read it, the story stuck with me, but it didn't speak to me. And that really is the difference between a 4 and a 5 star rating in my own personal system. If a book has 'it' I'll give it a 5, and if it doesn't, but is still very good, I'll drop down to a 4.

I think this, the year of our Lord 2022, going into year 3 of the COVID-19 pandemic was the right moment to give 'Station Eleven' a re-read.

What made this so good?

Well, there are thematic elements that are worth considering outside of actual pandemic times. Mandel does a great job of writing the pre-pandemic world in an incredibly unlikeable way, really pressing on certain elements of 'civilization' that run counter to her thesis that 'survival is insufficient' (apparently a Star Trek quote). You feel how dead inside certain characters are from spending years in the proverbial rat race: a paparazzo, an aging B-list actor, a scrum master/workflow optimizer. They all live at a 'peak' societal moment, and are certainly 'surviving' but by no means thriving, and are all deeply unhappy and unfulfilled. The pandemic changes that for the 2 that survive, one going on to be a doctor and the other a museum curator in the 'after' times.

This alone isn't really that unique of an observation, and I would even go so far as to point out that it's a bit tone deaf to focus on middle to upper-middle class to rich people who are just 'surviving' but not living when so many people in the world legitimately struggle to survive without even the opportunity for self-actualization. It left a weird taste in my mouth until I realized that perhaps focussing on exactly that group in society was the point.

I wish she would have at least acknowledged the privilege those people had to even be contemplating that type of ennui, but the question is valid: why, even with all the technology, the medical advances, the infrastructure, electricity, and chai lattes are we all still so unhappy? Why are so few actually thriving when most people living in our principle 'before' setting of Toronto are living at objectively the 'best' time in history with the overall best quality of life people had ever been able to have? She offers glimmers of ideas, but ultimately settles on a sort of nebulous: 'maybe we value the wrong things too highly.'

Then the pandemic happens.

Having now had a tad of firsthand experience of such things, there are definitely some familiar plot beats: disbelief, panic, pandemonium. But we never get to find out if there would have been conspiracy theories or fervent deniers or anti-maskers/vaxxers because in Mandel's pandemic everyone dies. Immediately. Civilization collapses in less than a few months when 99% of the population dies of a mysterious flu within that time.

It makes you wonder in our own times what percentage of fatality would have been high enough to get more buy-in from some of the nay-sayers (sure hope we don't have to find out...).

I read another review of this book in which the person took issue with how useless the people left alive were, unable to re-build civilization during the 20 years post-apocalypse that we get to see. Buddy: if you're out there somewhere and stumble across this, consider: how many people do you know that know how to make soap or cloth or build a wagon? In what I would consider a pretty fair decision, Mandel hedges her bets and assumes most people post-pandemic would be too traumatized and too dependent on not needing survival skills to be making steam engines based on instructions in a hypothetical book at an abandoned library.

It was all I could personally think about while reading: what were people going to do when the old buildings started falling apart? When they ran out of paper? Out of cloth? Heck, even out of canned vegetables. Most jobs in the first world just don't prepare you to suddenly have to be a farmer.

And I think that was the point. Why were people in this post-apocalyptic world living in such squalor when many of them would certainly know something about the thousands of years of human development that led to the 'modern era'? Something, something automation and supply chains, I shouldn't wonder.

I, a city dweller, wouldn't be able to survive very long without a grocery store, let alone 20 years. But maybe that's just me.

Mandel doesn't by any means shy away from the trauma of surviving such an event or the problems inherent to a limited number of survivors, many of whom don't even know how to hunt, trying to...well...survive when you suddenly don't have a grocery store and heat and plumbing.

Not by any means to downplay how traumatic our very real pandemic has been by any means, but I am grateful that our hospital and supply chain systems haven't collapsed (thanks in large part to the herculean efforts on the part of hospital and customer service personnel and got knows the factory workers) and that even at the incredibly scary and uncertain beginning I could still reliably go buy food and then return to my heated flat.

I suppose that's ultimately what really got to me about this novel. It got me feeling nostalgic for a world that we by all accounts haven't actually lost. It sure makes all those people complaining about wearing a mask for the 15 minutes they're at the grocery story seem hella petty. But more than that, Mandel suggests that (and this is perhaps directed most pointedly at those people whose lives resemble her characters') we really do live at the best time to be alive in terms of convenience, healthcare, safety, etc. and that we owe a debt of gratitude to the systems and people that allow it to be so. We actually have the opportunity to make our lives meaningful without (hopefully) the collapse of civilization, and to not spend so much time shading everything with grey.

Having to read about how we should all view air travel as 'a marvel' rather than a hassle is definitely something that will make some readers roll their eyes, but I promise that 'Station Eleven' never crosses over into the realm of toxic positivity, and Mandel is careful to explore the 'the grass is always greener' proverb with more nuance and grace than my words may suggest.

Finally, the construction of 'Station Eleven.' We're following two timelines: the 'before' timeline and the 'after timeline' and Mandel splices and slides back and forth between them with no adhesion to chronology. This may not be everyone's cup of tea, and some might find it gimmicky, but I would argue that it is done with extreme care to create a chronological reveal of information if not time. Every connection made feels like it comes at the right time so that by the end of the novel everything in between has been nicely stitched up in a 'coming full circle' chapter that takes us back to just minutes before the opening of the novel. Had she written the story in two complete, separate sections, I think the reading experience would have lost some of its momentum, and key connections would have felt less significant, considering how the central figure of the entire book dies on page 2 (spoilers?).

If I come back to 'Station Eleven' in the future I could see myself knocking off a star or so, but in year 3 of this pandemic, while the zombie films and dystopian apocalypse novels can be cathartic, it's nice to see some optimism, and to leave this on Mendel's thesis, this was a good moment to be reminded that 'new normal' doesn't have to be a bad thing. Calamity certainly brings out the worst in some people, but those of us privileged enough not to be working ourselves to the bone at a hospital or living paycheck to paycheck while the doors of businesses and borders of countries swing open and shut in a dizzying pendulum swing, we still have our chai lattes, and our families, and our favorite shows, and washing machines, and we still have Shakespeare.