Very early in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, the author brilliantly conveys just how different her novel is from what it seems to be. The book launches with the death of a middle-aged actor on stage, while playing King Lear. A paramedic in training rushes on stage to try to save his life. One of the young child actresses in the play watches in terror as the life seeps from him. But his death is unavoidable. The girl is spirited away. The paramedic goes for a walk in the snow.



If it seems like this will be another tale of the preciousness of life and the importance of small things, it is. But not in the way you’re expecting. At the conclusion of the very next chapter, Mandel dispatches with a small collection of minor characters by noting that the last of them to be alive will die in just a handful of weeks on the road out of the city. Yes, Station Eleven is a post-apocalyptic novel. It’s also not one. And as the novel’s elegant, beautiful design unfurls, its consideration of what is not just precious but meaningful about life becomes all the more poignant.



Roughly speaking, the book follows three timelines. It sends the paramedic forward into the present, as the Georgia Flu descends over the world, while he locks himself in an apartment with his brother. It jumps ahead 20 years to consider the life of the girl — now grown — wandering what is left of the communities around Lake Michigan with a traveling symphony/theatrical troupe. And it slides backward in time to consider the life of the actor, his best friend, and his first wife. Mandel, thus, bumps pre-apocalypse right alongside post-apocalypse, juxtaposing the alien familiarity of a Los Angeles dinner party with the familiar alienness of the world post-fall.



It makes for a beautiful book, one that is richly evocative of a world seemingly always on the cusp of some new, terrible beginning, and Mandel’s prose does justice to her ideas. Hardcore post-apocalyptic literature fans may grouse that there’s nothing new here, but that’s sort of the point. Mandel is less interested in how humanity ends (the flu seems almost an afterthought) and more about how humanity endures even in the face of this terrible death. There are places where the book’s design can seem too neat, the pieces fitting together a little too coincidentally, but even there, Mandel seems to be arguing that only art can help us make sense of the senseless, that only it is what will keep us from the brink.



—Todd VanDerWerff