Book Review: Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The novel begins in a theater in Toronto where aging actor Arthur Leander is playing the role of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary is watching from a front-row seat as Arthur flubs a line, stumbles, acts confused, and collapses. A medic-in-training, he recognizes the signs of cardiac arrest and leaps onto the stage and begins CPR. Arthur dies there, amid falling plastic snow, the curtain mercifully drawn, the other actors--including young Kirsten Raymonde--standing in shock and dismay.
That night, as Jeevan wanders home through the snow, his friend calls him from a hospital, telling him that the Georgian Flu that had lately been mentioned in the news is fast on its way to becoming a pandemic. The friend warns Jeevan to get out of town immediately. Instead, Jeevan goes to his wheelchair-bound brother's apartment after stopping at the grocery store for carts full of supplies.
The novel then leaps in time two decades, and we learn that the pandemic was indeed devastating, with a 99.9% worldwide mortality rate. Society fractured and decayed, and most of the survivors live in very small communities, each day a struggle.
Kirsten Raymonde, the young child actor, is now a young woman, and she is part of the Traveling Symphony which migrates back and forth along the shores of Michigan performing orchestral works and Shakespeare's plays. Their motto is lifted from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager: "Because survival is insufficient."
And really, that is one of the keys to this book. In this post-pandemic world, the things that help people grow and survive are the bonds they forge with each other and the beauty they create together. The book is told unfolds in both past and present, weaving the stories of Arthur; his first wife, Miranda; his second wife, Elizabeth; his friend Clark; Jeevan; and Kirsten. We learn who they were and who they are, we mourn what they have lost, and we look with hope at what they create.
Post-apocalyptic stories are often dark, full of violent struggles to survive. Instead, this book is a symphony of praise for the beautiful world we have, the world we take for granted, where we can flip a switch and have light, turn a dial and have heat or cold, touch some buttons and call a friend. We forget to be thankful for that, and in this time of global pandemic, it is good, in my opinion, to dwell on what we have, not what we don't have.