Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Shew! This is going to be a difficult book to review, because there is so much to say. So much to say, if fact, that I am already dreading trying to make it coherent.

“No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

First off, I loved this. Station Eleven is a very clever book. It isn't just an apocalyptic book. The story starts just before the characters learn of the 'cause' of the apocalypse. It begins during a stage production of King Lear and the actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, falls down and dies of a heart attack on stage. A man in the audience, Jeevan, tries to save him while a young girl, Kirsten, one of the cast members, watches. The story then jumps ahead 20 years, and we follow Kirsten, who is a member of a travelling group of actors.

Station Eleven doesn't have a protagonist as such. It follows the lives of these people, in a not-necessarily-chronologically order. The only thing these people have in common is that they are directly, or indirectly, connected to the dead actor.

This story explores interesting theories on the world and how it would change in the event of a disaster such as this occurring. Naturally. not all of these scenarios are pleasant, but I feel that there is a lot of accuracy in this telling.

I am looking forward to rereading this book in a few months. It was well constructed, and I fear that I missed too many things because it has been a couple of decades since I read King Lear. (It does not require the reader to be familiar with Shakespeare's plays, but I think that a reader who is will get a lot more out of this.) I think I will give it another go next year sometime, after giving King Lear a reread.

I suppose that, at the end of the day, that is really what anyone would want to hear. Yes, it is fine to dedicate a few hours of your life to this one. It would not be a waste of time. I do not necessarily think that everyone would love this, but I definitely did.

I gave this 5 stars on Goodreads.
This is the 41st book I have read for the 2015 TBR Pile Reading challenge.