Station Eleven

I read this one in August, which is a bad month up here for smoke and a good month for reading, because there’s usually enough haze on the horizon that you’re already half thinking about the world ending slow instead of fast. The Georgia Flu kills off most of the planet in the opening chapters and Mandel doesn’t dwell on the dying part much. She’s more interested in what people do twenty years out, once the corpses are old news and what’s left is a Traveling Symphony walking the shoreline of Lake Michigan doing Shakespeare for settlements that used to be gas stations.

That’s the part that got me. Not the collapse. The aftermath, and specifically the idea that people would keep performing plays nobody strictly needs once you’ve got no antibiotics and no glass. The Symphony’s motto is painted on one of their wagons, borrowed from Star Trek: survival is insufficient. I thought about that a fair amount on shift, watching for smoke that mostly isn’t there, doing a job that’s justified by the one day in five years it matters and otherwise looks a lot like just sitting around reading. Insufficient covers a lot of territory.

The book jumps around in time, before and after, centered loosely on an actor named Arthur Leander who dies on stage the night the flu starts spreading, and the people whose lives touch his. A paparazzo turned paramedic. A first wife who wrote comic books about a space station that never got published, just photocopied and handed to a couple people, and one of those bootleg comics ends up carried across the ruined Midwest like scripture. It’s a small object holding a lot of weight and Mandel earns it, doesn’t oversell it.

Structurally it took me a chapter or two to trust. The braided timeline can feel show-offy in other books. Here it works because she’s patient with the seams, lets you sit in 2003 for a while before jumping to year 20. Nothing rushed. The prose has that same quality, plain sentences that don’t call attention to themselves until you notice how much they’re carrying.

My one complaint, and it’s minor, is that the villain thread with the prophet gets a little conventional toward the end, tidier than the rest of the book’s instincts. Everything else resists tidiness and that subplot doesn’t quite.

Still. This is the kind of book you finish and then go stand outside the cabin for a while looking at the ridgeline. Five months alone up a mountain gives you a lot of sympathy for people trying to keep something worth keeping going, art included, once the emergency’s technically over and it’s just the long quiet after.