📚 Finished reading Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel.
Imagine Covid but much worse.
This book was released in 2014, several years before the Covid-19 pandemic but is surely a more emotional experience to read after (well, during it). In one or two interviews I saw, the author, very understandably, even seems to feel a little bad that the IRL plague might have proved positive for her in a marketing sense.
Anyway, back in this imaginary world we see a pandemic flu come to the fore - the ‘Georgia Flu’.
But it’s far, far more virulent in terms of spreading and killing than our most recent real life pandemic was. The vast majority of humans are dead within weeks.
Civilisation as we know it collapses in short order.
Travelling via air was one of the first casualties. But within a few years the few folk that survived now live mostly in small, guarded, settlements in a world without basic services such as plumbing or electricity. People are dying of things we’d find inconsequential for the lack of medical resources or technologies.
The book goes forwards and backwards through time, pre and post pandemic , with the most recent sections being set around year 20 of the pandemic if I remember correctly. By that point we have young folk who never knew the pre-pandemic world in place. For this new generation the idea of flying machines and lit up TV screens is pure science fiction.
Governments are long gone. Borders are unguarded. The very concept of countries is alien to those who don’t remember the before-times. In any case there’s no realistic way to travel long distances unless you like very long journeys by horse.
The book follows the lives of various characters before and after the big event. Much of it is centred around the story of a group of musicians and actors known as the ‘Travelling Symphony’.
This is a band of not always merry men and women who travel via horse and cart from settlement to settlement - a far from risk-free endeavour - in order to perform music and theatre to the residents. Why? For them, ‘survival is insufficient’; a quote explicitly borrowed from Star Trek: Voyager.
This is a very engaging, wonderfully written book whose sentimental impact and poignancy has surely only increased now most of us have lived through an admittedly far milder, but still plenty deadly, pandemic of our own.
Whilst dark and upsetting in places - it wasn’t only the good guys who survived, and the collapse of civilisation wouldn’t be pretty either way - the overall message could be taken as one of hope, of the indefatigability of humans and their humanity.
There’s a recent TV show based on the book too which I’m enthusiastic to see at some point.
