Station Eleven is the 2014 dystopian, science fiction novel by Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel. Dystopian novels occupy a very special place in literature, with classics like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale being the subjects of much literary debate and scholarly focus. In recent times, however, it seems as if the dystopian novel has shifted somewhat into a more mainstream, more commercial area of literary writing – as evidenced by young-adult novels like The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. Mandel’s novel straddles the line between these two types of dystopian novels – while remaining accessible to all kinds of readers, it is still a novel with depth and it is worthy of much literary analysis.
The novelist tells the stories of a range of equally fascinating characters, all of whom form part of the remaining one percent of human beings who are left behind after a flu pandemic results in deaths all over the world. Some of these include: Kirsten, a theatre actress who, along with a travelling troupe, performs Shakespeare in the post-apocalyptic society; Jeevan, a paramedic who has been forced to be upgraded as a “doctor” once the pandemic hits; Tyler, a young and somewhat sheltered son of a famous actor who grows up to become a fanatical and dangerous leader of a religious cult. One of the beauties of the novel is the way it shows us how different people react to the same situation. Jeevan takes up the mantle and uses his skills to help people as the world crumbles around them. Tyler exploits people’s fears and uses the uncertainty of the new world to his advantage. In this way, the novel becomes a remarkable study of character motivations, choice, change, and many other themes which constitute the human experience.
Also remarkable is the way the author uses the dystopian, post-apocalyptic world she has created as a commentary on the present, on contemporary society, and the people who are a part of it. For example, Mandel’s use of art in the text is exquisite. Theatre is used by the characters as a way of both coping with their new circumstances and as a way of remembering the past. By having her characters perform Shakespeare in a post-apocalyptic world, Mandel is reminding us that without technology (without movies and the internet), it is to our primitive roots that we return. Theatre, with its origins in prehistoric ritual and its reliance on voice and body conveys the idea of returning to a previous age, to the beginning – or a new beginning – and drives home the point that the characters like actors are forced to rely both on their physical and mental attributes for success and survival. The author further underscores our present reliance on technology through her establishment of the “Museum of Civilization” in the novel – an area housed in an abandoned airport where once vital symbols of the technological era of humanity that has been lost because of the pandemic (such as computers, useless in the post-apocalyptic world) are put on display and explained to the bewildered children born post-pandemic.
Overall, the novel is a beautiful, smart, readable and deeply profound exploration of technology, of human connectedness, of survival, of art, and of adapting to change.