Book Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
This blog post was written by a human.This is a spoiler-free review.Hi readers and writerly friends!
This week, in Bookish Things, I’m doing an in-depth review of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and ooh-hoo-hoo do I have so much to say about this book. So, let’s dive right in!
Station Elven Paperback by Emily St. John Mandel with votive candles. Photo by Payton Hayes.
For starters, I must admit that reading this pandemic dystopian fiction in 2020 has absolutely influenced my opinion of it. The subject matter and premise felt more tangible and less like words on a page after existing during COVID-19. Station Eleven book will forever hold a special meaning for me because it represents a lot of my worst fears about how the pandemic could potentially spiral into a full-blown apocalypse scenario. This severity doesn’t seem so far-fetched. I think, if everyone read this book when the pandemic began, we’d be in a much better state right about now.
This is your friendly reminder to stay home and wear a mask if you have to go out. Trust me, we don’t want things to play out like they did in the story.
I’ll try and wrangle all my complicated feelings about this novel, but truly I feel awed and speechless. Reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a lot like slowly peeling back the layers of a yellow onion— tearing it away, bit by bit until you’ve reached the center. It’s a little savory, a little sweet and it lingers, but oh, it stings, that tiny sun in your palm. The layers of this story seem to unfold all at once, past and present interwoven together like the wedded roots of a great tree—the way the overlapping storylines finally, finally click into place with the final page.
On page, 144, in paragraph 3, Mandel writes:
Hell is the absence of the people you long for. (2015)
Woof.
Station Eleven is a story thick with nostalgia both for what once was and for what could have been. It’s a painfully realistic image of what life might be like thirty years after a devastating pandemic, and an economic collapse, people all over the globe desperate to survive. It’s a story of longing, sorrow, isolation, remembrance, and grief, but it’s also a story of preservation and perseverance—hope buzzing like the spark of electricity humming to life in a city just over the horizon, like a well-kept secret unleashed after decades of silence. It’s a story about survival, resilience.
On page, 233, in paragraph 1, Mandel writes:
These taken for granted miracles that had persisted all around them. (2015)
Naturally, the most poignant theme in this story is who and what we take for granted. With the parallels of the COVID-19 Pandemic, it was impossible to read this book and ignore it’s impact. During the pandemic, I came face-to-face with the ordinary people, places, and privileges I’d taken for granted—grocery stores and overnight stockers and bag boys. Before, I was never one for braving the crowds during peak shopping times or travelling in rush hour traffic, but I’ve found whimsy and respite in the short, yet essential outings to my local grocery store. Few and far between, those brief stints out into the world, following quarantine have renewed my appreciation for the little things—like clean water, electricity, modern medicine, microwavable dinners—and instilled in me an overwhelming sense of respect and gratitude for all those folks that compose the backbone of America.
On page, 178, Mandel writes:
On silent afternoons in his brother’s apartment, Jeevan found himself thinking how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the personality of the modern world, but that was a lie it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes the fallen tress from electrical lines. (2015)
Chills. Absolute. Chills.
I think of the grocery store clerks and nightly stockers “masking up” to make sure we’ve got access to food despite our collective isolation. I think of my dad who— recovered from a high-risk surgery in one of the biggest hospitals in Oklahoma during the peak of the pandemic—was a member of the “society’s most vulnerable” club, yet quarantined alone in his hospital room for more than a month, without ever getting COVID-19. I think of the healthcare workers with breakouts on their jawlines and angry, red indentations where the elastic on their N95s wore a rut in their cheeks. I think about what pictures play on the screen behind their eyes when they go to sleep at night. I think of the refrigerated trucks.
On page, 178, Mandel writes:
No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes the fallen tress from electrical lines. (2015)
The last line hit particularly close to home for me. It was during the 2020 ice storm and literally as I was reading this book, the power all along our street went out—a rogue tree limb had fallen over on one of the main powerlines in our neighborhood. The dreary winter afternoon paired with the power outage, isolation, and pandemic in the periphery, I felt like a forgotten dweller of the Undersea, longing for light and warmth where it seemed none was promised.
Station Eleven book cover photo. Found on npr.org.
The scariest thing about this story overall is most certainly the way Mandel explains how the collapse happened— how the pandemic spread across the globe like wildfire, consuming entire cities, and leaving crumbling civilizations in its wake, how phones and the internet went down and then electricity, and finally how gasoline staled and left people with zero communication and zero transportation. But then again, where could they go? The entire world was affected. It’s a very real possibility— a horror story rooted more so in reality than in the fantastical.
It's a story about what we leave behind, what we carry with us—baggage from a life and world before, and new beginnings and just what else this awakening world might contain.
And then there’s the unwillingness to comprehend the outbreak and the severity of it, even as it is presented by the news, the unwillingness to comprehend what it meant. The panic. After getting an alarming phone call from his nurse friend Hua, Jeevan rushes to the local store and fills seven shopping carts with groceries before pushing them miles through the snow to his brother’s apartment where they hole up there for weeks. Sound familiar?
On page, 239, in paragraph 2, Mandel writes:
He woke at 3:00 in the morning, shivering. The news had worsened. The fabric was unraveling. It will be hard to come back from this, the thought, because in those first days it was still inconceivable that civilization might not come back from this at all. (2015)
Station Eleven is an impeccably cleverly written glimpse into the not-so-far-off future of modern society following a terrible pandemic. The way Mandel lays out the puzzle pieces before the reader so that as the pages turn, the parts fall into place is beyond exceptional. I can typically see plots like this from a mile away and usually have the story figured out by the time I reach the last page. Mandel kept me guessing and wondering what all the interconnecting pieces meant. When it all came together, I was astonished.
And that’s it for my review of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven! Have you read this book? What are your thoughts on it? How does it make you feel after the COVID-19 pandemic and everything that’s happened in 2020? Let me know in the comments below!
Bibliography
Hayes, Payton. "Station Elven Paperback by Emily St. John Mandel with votive candles." January 1, 2021 (Thumbnail Photo).Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven. London: Picador, 2015.Mandel, Emily St. John. Station Eleven book cover. Photograph. NPR.. Accessed January 1, 2021.
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This blog post was researched, written, and published by a human author without the assistance of generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI). Gen-AI models are trained on text written by humans, therefore, the presence of specific punctuation, verbiage, tone, or predictable, marketing-style phrases alone are not sufficient indicators of gen-AI usage. I implore readers to use context clues, critical thinking, pattern recognition, research, and employ their best judgement when determining the validity of human authorship of print and digital media today. If you want to learn more about my stance on gen-AI and it’s role in media and the publishing industry, I plan to release a blog post on this topic very soon, so stay tuned for that. This disclaimer will be updated once that post goes live. In the meantime, I will continue to be transparent about which tools and resources I use in my work.
