Review: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

An interesting take on the apocalypse genre. Rather than zombies or nuclear war, this book focuses on something simpler and disturbingly more realistic: a swine flu pandemic that wipes out 99% of humans.

The parts of the book that focus on this pandemic and the aftermath are gripping, terrifying, and powerful. There’s no gore, no crazy violence, nothing flashy. Just a disease that spreads quickly, kills quickly, and, inevitably—almost quietly—brings the end of civilization. You read on in dark fascination as all human institutions collapse and people regress back to a time without planes, phones, electricity—and without law. The small groups of survivors, now isolated from each other, fighting for survival, wonder if they are the only ones left; you realize what the world was like before instant communication and rapid travel—when the “over there” of other continents and countries was an unseeable mystery. It’s powerful stuff.

But there are also parts of the book that flash back to the time before the pandemic and focus on the story of a rising actor and his friends, lovers, and colleagues. I suppose this provides a backstory for the characters we later see surviving in the post-apocalyptic world, and offer a nice contrast of “look at the things we worried about back then,” but for me, these flashbacks fell a bit flat. None of the characters seemed particularly interesting, so I found myself bored for large portions of the book, eagerly awaiting the next post-apocalyptic part.

Still, despite some flaws, this book is well worth a read.

Rating: 4 stars