Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven is the kind of novel that changes the way you look at people and art. Poignant, haunting, and fiercely optimistic, this book has you believe in humanity again. 

Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity. One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor's early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theater troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor's first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.

There are novels where you finish the last line and close the book and all you can do is stare off into the distance. That’s Station Eleven. This story is nothing short of atmospheric. The whole thing made me feel like I was in a snowglobe, being shaken around intermittently, unable to see anything the same when again when it’s all settled. That’s me. I’ll never be able to look at a plane streaking across the sky again without thinking of these characters. Emily St. John Mandel is a writer of immense skill, and her ability to weave in such a large cast into such a complex story amazes me. I wasn’t dearly attached to all the characters—the only reason this book has four stars and not five—but I loved all of them. Kirsten and August had my heart. The fact that they’re such good friends and stay that way, without the expectation of romance, only made their relationship that much stronger. Dieter was such a gentle soul, and I loved reading about the way he mentored the younger Symphony members around him. Clark and Miranda were by far my favorites, and Miranda’s final scenes broke me. Tyler was annoying, and the Prophet infuriated me, but the thing about Station Eleven is that it treats all its cast with the same level of compassion and blatant humanity that finding out they were the same person at the end only made me sad. 

There’s something about the exploration of grief through memory, and the exploration of memory through art, that is indescribable, but Mandel managed to do it. Music, theater, poetry, art—its the presence of all of these things that keeps the characters moving, before, during, and after the end of the world. It reminded me of writing at school in the midst of early-covid, not for publication but just to say that I’d finished the story in my head. Seeing that expressed in Miranda made me feel so seen. The way her work was carried through the world, connecting and influencing Tyler and Kirsten in different ways, was cool to see, but I enjoy the way Mandel explicitly showed that this wasn’t Miranda’s intention. It was just for her. It’s just that her work represented all the things the cast couldn’t put into words.

In such a grief-heavy story, in an apocalyptic story, the fact that all deaths are given equal importance and weight, that decisions have impacts that haunt characters for the rest of their lives, is an actual breath of fresh air. This book doesn’t have trauma porn—it’s realistic and kind with its cast. No one suffers for the sake of character development. Similarly, there’s no violence for the sense of violence. Action scenes, as far and few between as they are, are sad, heavy moments that stick with us. This is where the book is blatantly optimistic, it believes that, even at the end of the world, people cannot live with being cruel. 

Emily St. John Mandel was born and raised on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. She studied contemporary dance at the School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York. She is the author of five novels, including The Glass Hotel (spring 2020) and Station Eleven (2014.) Station Eleven was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the Morning News Tournament of Books, and has been translated into 34 languages. She lives in NYC with her husband and daughter.

You can find more on Mandel at her website, http://www.emilymandel.com/. Her newest novel, Sea of Tranquility, is out now. The TV series “Station Eleven”, based on the book, is available for streaming now on HBO Max.