Station Eleven review

Station Eleven begins with an actor dying of a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear in Toronto. Within hours, a flu pandemic begins killing ninety-nine percent of the world's population. The novel moves between the pre-collapse world — the lives of the actor, his ex-wives, a paparazzo who becomes a paramedic, a child actress who grows up in the aftermath — and the post-collapse world, twenty years later, where a Traveling Symphony performs Shakespeare and classical music for settlements of survivors in the Great Lakes region. Their motto is a line from Star Trek Voyager: survival is insufficient.

The novel is structured as a mosaic of timelines. Mandel is interested less in the mechanics of collapse than in the question of what survives it and why. Art survives — the Symphony performs because people need beauty, not just calories. Memory survives, in the form of a graphic novel called Station Eleven that the child actress carries with her and that turns out to connect her to the actor who died on the first page. Objects survive, accumulating meaning across the decades. The structure enacts its own argument: everything is connected, and the connections only become visible through time.