The Apocalypse, But Not the End
By Alan Dove
A pandemic. Global supply chains grind to a halt. Millions die. History splits into “before” and “after.” Sound familiar? Having lived that story myself, I’m in no hurry to revisit it. I have little interest in re-reading news from 2020, and the trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic - and the appalling mismanagement that made it so much worse - solidified my longstanding aversion to post-apocalyptic fiction.
Good books are good books, though, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven has garnered heaps of recommendations since its 2014 release. It had been on my reading list almost as long, and this weekend I finally got to it. If you haven’t read it yet, take it from this confirmed non-fan of the sub-genre: it’s a great read.
The setup is simple enough: a flu pandemic wipes out 99% of the human population, the modern world crashes to a halt, and decades later a few bands of survivors occupy primitive settlements scattered across the landscape. I have a few technical quibbles with Mandel’s scenario: the virus’s combination of contagiousness and virulence is a bit too extreme, parts of the social collapse story are a bit too Hobbesian, and a few of her descriptions of airport operations don’t make sense to a pilot. Those are all trivial gripes, though, against a magnificent work of literature.
Told from multiple perspectives in different time frames, from years before the pandemic to years after, the story unfolds along a central plot that follows a troupe of actors and musicians, the Traveling Symphony, formed shortly after the modern world collapsed. There are also stories within the story, ranging from Shakespeare’s King Lear to a strange but beautiful comic book that shares a title with the novel. It sounds convoluted, but Mandel weaves all of these lines together into an elegant tapestry, stitched with elegant prose that kept me turning the pages for hours.
I’m aware that the book was made into a TV miniseries a few years ago, but have no desire to see it. The beautiful writing, the rich internal lives of the well-drawn characters, and the epistolary interludes wouldn’t translate well to the screen, and those were some of my favorite parts.
The central theme is that art is not a luxury, but an essential nutrient for sustaining humanity. The Traveling Symphony’s tagline, painted onto a horse-drawn wagon made from the wreckage of a pickup truck, comes from an actual Star Trek Voyager episode: “Survival is insufficient.” The troupe pulls their makeshift caravan from one encampment to the next, bringing theater and music to lives otherwise filled with bleak drudgery.
There’s conflict aplenty, of course. Petty squabbles within the Symphony and stories of various characters’ personal troubles before the collapse form a realistic background, while lethal confrontations in the post-pandemic wilderness build to a satisfying climax near the end of the book. This is not a Mad Max action story of daring escapes and heroic victories, though; what violence there is feels justified, and Mandel shows us the consequences for all sides. What emerges is a story of optimism, of people making the best of a horrible situation, and of art reinforcing life and helping it persevere. The world may end, but the show will go on.