Title: Station Eleven Author: Emily St. John Mandel
Published: September 9, 2014
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 336
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads: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.
Er, well. I’m honestly lost as to what all the fuss was about. I wouldn’t go so far as to say Station Eleven was terrible, but it certainly doesn’t strike me as any different than the massive influx of post-apocalyptic fiction that’s saturated the market over the past few years. I give Emily St. John Mandel credit for attempting something new and innovative with the genre, but it really didn’t pan out. By and large, this book is boring and unsatisfying.
The plot here is really quite a mess, and hardly original. A deadly virus wipes out 99% of the human population on earth, technology fails, survivors are left to fend for themselves in a lawless new world, a charismatic leader rises up and forms a cult, but maybe there’s some grain of hope left for our protagonists to grasp on to. Hmm. This sounds oddly like every single other post-apocalyptic novel I’ve ever read. And while I get that Mandel was limited by some things, and that rehashing old storylines isn’t necessarily bad, what I’ve found is that the best post-apocalyptic novels are ones with grim, lyrical, introspective prose that’s beautiful and raw and makes the oft-told plot work.
Unfortunately, the prose in Station Eleven is no bueno. Mandel alternates between fragments (ugh) and 200-plus-word-long sentences (yes, I counted). There were additionally passages with repetitive structures that might have been nice had the author not taken it too far and beaten the horse well past dead. I don’t like fragments, and I’m a big believer in sentences that don’t require more than 2 lungfuls of oxygen to repeat. These two styles in conjunction made me eyeroll to infinity.
This lack of finesse in writing also comes across in characterization. This is a very ambitious book, one that attempts to be far-reaching and complete, but I don’t think it happened. Station Eleven has too many characters—so many that most are only referred to by their job title or by their relation to another character. Moreover, the author attempts an omniscient perspective that distances and alienates readers from the few named characters there are. These people felt very much like rough, rudimentary sketches of people, but without the depth and facets that create authenticity. They were flat and, too often, indistinguishable from one another.
And, to return to plot, the main “tension” of the book, between the Prophet figure and the rest of the cast, is so underwhelming I wanted to scream my frustration. Besides the fact that the author’s establishment of this villain is laughably implausible and shabby, Mandel sets up this big conflict between her maniacal cult leader and some passersby, but then “solves” the problem in a matter of a sentence after an extremely drawn-out sequence with, essentially, deus ex machina. The rage. Oh lord, the rage.
Beyond plot and characters, I feel that Station Eleven attempts to speak other truths about art and its prevailing significance, but doesn’t quite make it to that point. The characters are all involved with Shakespeare in some way—performing it, usually. And we all know that I love Shakespeare, but I felt that there was a deeper connection that Mandel meant to draw, but couldn’t amid her sloppy prose and silly plot elements. Likewise, the book’s title comes from a comic book series that one of the characters is writing/drawing, and while that was all very interesting, I felt that the significance of the comic was buried beneath other things, and so as a result seemed like a useless device in a story that’s already far too cluttered.
As I said, I fail to see what all the fuss is about. A standard plot wrapped in pretentious writing and half-baked attempts at speaking to the human condition. I didn’t get anything from Station Eleven, and I cannot honestly think of a thing I did like. I found this book to be dull and sloppy and disappointing, overall.
