WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Station Eleven cleverly recounts what life might have been like if Covid-19 had triumphed.
While the lockdown is largely behind us, many are still hugely aware of the need to guard against a Covid-19 resurgence and how practices like social distancing may remain a common part of life, especially in certain age groups.
Who can forget the US “super-spreader” who infected 52 people (out of a total of 61) in two-and-a-half hours of choir practice back in March?
And while New Zealand has coped well with the virus, there is a fascinating insight into what might have happened if coping hadn’t been an option.
Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven is a cracking read, especially for anyone still subject to, or even unconvinced by, the need for the isolation this country has been through and its effects on our lives and economy.
The date is sometime in the future, when a virus called the Georgia Flu cuts through the world, killing most of humanity. So far, so familiar. There have been truckloads of apocalyptic novels of the same basic thrust, through Cormac McCarthy’s dark The Road to the zombie comic book series (and TV show) The Walking Dead and the violence of Mad Max.
But it’s the essential relationship of Station Eleven to Covid-19 that binds you to it. It’s all there - the panic buying, the powerlessness against a virus for which there is no vaccine, the initial disorder and how the human tribe splits into good and evil (perhaps a metaphor for our times in the majority who knuckled down to lockdown and the minority of idiots who didn’t, for whom the world of self ruled).
Mandel uses chillingly simple but elegant prose and characterisation to chart the lives of various survivors, tracing how they intersect – often in a group of Shakespearean entertainers and musicians called the Travelling Symphony. The common thread linking their stories is Arthur Leander, a fading Hollywood star who is starring in a performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
He dies before the virus kills 99.6 per cent of the global population – but he is the human sun around which this story orbits as it jumps back and forth in time, witnessing how his life and actions influence what happen to the band of survivors, good and bad, and how they think.
Mandel almost effortlessly chronicles the world’s speedy descent into something we can barely recognise but this is no horror- filled violence with survivors turning into zombies or adult versions of the Lord Of The Flies killers. Rather, it is about hope and the key role of art in being human.
It is no accident Leander is playing in King Lear – Shakespeare’s renowned tragedy has many themes, good vs evil and the restoration of order after chaos among them. The travelling troupe has its own ups and downs and differing views but they are one of the last remaining vestiges of human common sense and creativity.
Even though there are shocks in store, Station Eleven isn’t really about apocalypse as much as it is about loss, nostalgia and yearning – and how art restores our spirit and underlines our humanity.
Plenty will draw the obvious parallel between that and the heightened community spirit that grew amongst us during the lockdown.
All the way through, there are passages and quotes in the book which also relate to our time now and we get a sense of what might have been when Kirsten – a character linked to Leander and one of the central figures in the book – says the new normal is most difficult for those old enough to remember the good times: “The more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”
The book was released in 2014 so you’ll probably only find it in libraries or online providers. Mandel has written another this year – The Glass Hotel – which deals with the next horror we may all have to face: financial meltdown.