Station Eleven

Cover image courtesy and copyright Knopf 2014

One of Brooklyn's writers, Emily St. John Mandel is the author of four books, most recently Station Eleven (Knopf), a finalist for this year's National Book Award in fiction. It's a post-apocalyptic novel and mystery, a tale that shifts back and forth between two time frames--the life of a film actor in the present day, and a time 20 years later after a lethal flu eradicates more than 99% of the population.

Following the pandemic and societal collapse, a theater troupe and symphony roam the scattered settlements around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan, putting on plays and performing music for the public in each town. A new culture has begun to emerge.

"It's about a traveling Shakespearean theater company in a post-apocalyptic North America," says Emily. "It's also about friendship, memory, love, celebrity, our obsession with objects, oppressive dinner parties, comic books, and knife-throwing." 

An excerpt:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ballgames played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take photographs of concert stages. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position--but no, that wasn't true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels. The Traveling Symphony moved between the settlements of the changed world and had been doing so since five years after the collapse, when the conductor had gathered a few of her friends from their military orchestra, left the air base where they'd been living, and set out into the unknown landscape. 

After six months of traveling from town to town--the word town used loosely; some of these places were four or five families living together in a former truck stop--the conductor's orchestra had run into Gil's company of Shakespearean actors, who had all escaped from Chicago together and then worked on a farm for a few years and had been on the road for three months, and they'd combined their operations.

Twenty years after the collapse they were still in motion. The Symphony performed music--classical, jazz, orchestral arrangements of pre-collapse pop songs--and Shakespeare. They'd performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.

"People want what was best about the world,"  Dieter said. He himself found it difficult to live in the present. He'd played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar.

What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty. Twilight in the altered world, a performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a parking lot in the mysteriously named town of St. Deborah by the Water, Lake Michigan shining a half mile away. Kirsten as Titania, a crown of flowers on her close-cropped hair, the jagged scar on her cheekbone half-erased by candlelight. The audience is silent. Sayid, circling her in a tuxedo that Kirsten found in a dead man's closet near the town of East Jordan: "Tarry, rash wanton. Am I not thy lord?" 

"Then I must be thy lady." Lines of a play written in 1594, the year London's theaters reopened after two seasons of plague. Or written possibly a year later, in 1595, a year before the death of Shakespeare's only son. Some centuries later on a distant continent, Kirsten moves across the stage in a cloud of painted fabric.

"But with thy brawls," she continues, "thou has disturbed our sport." She never feels more alive than at these moments. When onstage she fears nothing. 

Shakespeare was the third born to his parents, but the first to survive infancy. Four of his siblings died young. His son, Hamnet, died at eleven and left behind a twin. Plague closed the theaters again and again, death flickering over the landscape. And now in a twilight once more lit by candles, the age of electricity having come and gone, Titania turns to face her fairy king. "Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, pale in her anger, washes all the air, that rheumatic diseases do abound." 

Oberon watches her with his entourage of fairies. Titania speaks as if to herself now, Oberon forgotten. Her voice carries high and clear over the silent audience, over the string section waiting for their cue on stage left. "And through this distemperature, we see the seasons alter." 

All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.