What will survive of us when the world stops? What will we cling to if life as we know it ends? There are a lot of potent ideas at play in Emily St John Mandel’s fourth novel. A flu virus has wiped out most of the world’s population. Those who survive are plunged into a world without antibiotics or internet or air travel. What marks this apart from so many similar apocalyptic narratives is its scope. It’s one of the most considered and ideas-rich takes on the genre. Mandel does describe the devastation of the initial outbreak, but only in a fragmentary fashion, a shard here, a shard there. The bulk of the narrative slides back and forth between the world before and a period two decades after the crisis, when those left behind have had time to adapt and are attempting to begin again.
The survivors have formed settlements, which are visited by a travelling symphony performing the works of Shakespeare. The performers use a line from Star Trek – “survival is insufficient” – as their motto and there is a sense that all texts from the pre-flu world have become artefacts, relics of a lost civilisation, to be treasured and studied and celebrated. The title comes from a graphic novel that has taken on almost talismanic properties in Year Twenty. In this way Mandel covers some of the same thematic ground as Anne Washburn’s “post-electric” play, Mr Burns, in which a similar group of a survivors recreate episodes of The Simpsons, but her approach is less clinical and more hopeful.
The novel’s cast of characters is large and some of them are more fleshed out than others, but the most memorable include Jeevan, a one-time journalist turned trainee paramedic, and Kirsten, a performer with the symphony who was a child when the deadly virus struck; some things she remembers vividly, others she has let herself forget.
You could argue that the flashbacks to the life of Arthur Leander, a famous actor who died (of natural causes) on the day the flu hit, are too numerous and detract from the narrative momentum, but the novel’s imaginative breadth is considerable; it’s full of serrated details about all the things, small and large, lost to the world, and yet it is also consoling in its belief that there are some things that will continue, some things that will remain.
Station Eleven is published by Picador (£7.99). Click here to buy it for £6.39
