Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - Station Eleven

Purposefully tidy, literary take on the pandemic post-apocalyptic novel. I found the writing to have a quieter tone, an intimacy and interconnectedness of the type that rarely goes hand-in-hand with a propulsive plot, but this is exception that proves the rule. This book lives in the observant minds of individuals and the one-on-one conversations that are the basis for any relationship, while making the reader think more widely on community and the relationships that comprise it.

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

I am also left thinking about the themes on memory, legacy, grief, and perspective. The setting is a post-apocalyptic world, but while integral to the plot, I feel like it is merely the window-dressing or a device to explore introspective topics. At it's core, this is a book about humanity, about love, and about art.

“But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.”

In this book, St. John Mandel writes about the decline of society into chaos and violence and desperation, but does so in simple prose that slips into poetry. The novel does go back and forth in time, much of the story actually takes place prior to the pandemic, exploring individual characters and their impact on one another, the connectedness that we take for granted... then it slips back to the post-pandemic time period where many of the characters are no longer alive (I don't think this can be said to be a spoiler - it's a post-apocalyptic book and the book opens with a death), but the reverberations of their lives are carried forward, the smallest action, the most thoughtless kindness or neglect ripples through the timeline; it's really quite beautiful.

“First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

The aforementioned tidiness is something I am still thinking on - is it a cop-out to say that the tidiness is both a strength and weakness of the book? I read Severance by Ling Ma just prior to this book and was struck by the vast contrasts of two books that on the surface seem to have much in common. Severance was a messy book, which I know can sound like a negative, but I don't think of it that way in relation to novels, I seem to find myself more-and-more drawn to beautiful messes rather than pretty tidiness. Reading these two so close together may have proved a disservice to Station Eleven, not because I think that the one is better than the other, if anything Station Eleven is the superiorly written novel, but it's the contrast that leaves me hung up on the tidiness. This makes me think of music that I think of as "highly produced" or "over produced", it's not bad, it's just too smooth for my taste - which again, probably unfair to say of this book, Emily St. John Mandel does not shy away from the ugly nor does she gloss over human flaws; perhaps it is a combination of the beautiful language and the clearly laid out structure that holds the characters together that gives me pause. I think I am quibbling over forethought, which is an exceedingly silly thing to quibble about - this is a great novel, with well-developed characters and an engrossing plot - deserving of all the accolades and attention it has received. I look forward to picking up more by St. John Mandel, I imagine she could illuminate the dullest reader to the beauty of the most mundane with only a few words.

Content Warnings