Station Eleven (2011) by Emily St. John Mandel

There are a number of things to like in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven.

The structure of the book is scattered, but not overly so. She manages it with admirable skill, always varying the experience for the reader and never feeling too disorganized or too jarring in her transitions. The variety in formats, settings, and time periods for any given chapter are quite compelling and serve to keep the experience fresh and engaging. I particularly enjoyed the bits of epistolary and loved how they changed up the narrative.

Additionally, St. John Mandel is subdued, effective writer of prose and a skilled writer of characters. Although I felt a bit tired of the the-way-it-used-to-be bits and thought she went back to the well a bit too often in that regard, I did very much enjoy her exploration of her characters' feelings. Character was the big winner for me in Station Eleven. I felt engaged and drawn to characters like Arthur and Miranda, particularly. By the end I grew to dislike Arthur, but he felt like a real human being to me, whereas he could have come off as a flimsy caricature of the typical Hollywood actor. Miranda, likewise, is fresh and entertaining as a career-oriented corporate type who manages, miraculously, not to be insufferable. Both characters feel well-rounded and both are stumbling through life, attempting to find contentment. I enjoyed their narratives.

However, Station Eleven falters in how cliched its post-apocalypse setting feels.

Initially the premise is unique and interesting: A traveling theater troupe in a ruined world! What an idea. The promise of existentialist themes drew me in immediately and it was, indeed, what got me to pick up this book in the first place. Survival is not enough is an idea I find compelling and worthy of exploration. Unfortunately the post-apocalypse narrative doesn't do very much with its unique premise or its stated themes. Instead it tends to rely on tried-and-true post apocalypse tropes that you've seen and heard a thousand times before. Scavenging in ruined locales, human beings falling prey to savagery, and, of course, the stale, overused meme that is religious-nutjobs-in-the-apocalypse. I found the character of the prophet to be so dry and uninteresting I couldn't even manage to bring myself to be repulsed by his cackling, boring evildoing.

I suppose it's possible that much of the past decade's post-apocalypse fiction has spoiled Station Eleven for me with the Seinfeld effect, but so much of it is so stale at this point that I couldn't bring myself to enjoy almost any of the post-apocalypse scenes. Fiction such as The Walking Dead and The Last of Us have already depicted these post-apocalyptic tropes so much more skillfully, more well-rounded, more engaging than Station Eleven does that I ended up feeling like this book including its post-apocalypse content as a selling point—"Nerds love post-apocalyptic shit!"—when St. John Mandel really wanted to tell a story about Arthur and his many failures, Miranda and her successes, and so on. For me, the latter is far more interesting and engaging than the former, and I wish this book had leaned more heavily on exploring these interesting characters and spent far less time in the post-apocalypse sandbox where so many others have already built and left superior sandcastles before.

⭐⭐