My one sentence blurb: A multi-timeline, multi-perspective novel about life before and after an apocalypse.
Actual synopsis (Credit: Goodreads synopsis):
Set in the days of civilization’s collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be saviour, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
One snowy night a famous Hollywood actor slumps over and dies onstage during a production of King Lear. Hours later, the world as we know it begins to dissolve. Moving back and forth in time—from the actor’s early days as a film star to fifteen years in the future, when a theatre troupe known as the Traveling Symphony roams the wasteland of what remains—this suspenseful, elegiac, spellbinding novel charts the strange twists of fate that connect five people: the actor, the man who tried to save him, the actor’s first wife, his oldest friend, and a young actress with the Traveling Symphony, caught in the crosshairs of a dangerous self-proclaimed prophet.
⭐ Review
This book has been on my TBR pile for such a long time. I think I first heard about it from Reagan from PeruseProject on YouTube. In fact, I managed to find the exact video where she reviews it and gave it 5 out of 5 stars. (Side note: Reagan was a university student making videos about the books she was reading in 2014. I think she was the main reason why I started getting interested in reading again in secondary school. Recently, she got married to her long-time boyfriend and it’s just so cool to see how times have changed.)
I finally picked it up and I wonder why I never did so earlier! The book jumps back and forth between different timelines and across different perspectives. We get to see the impact of an apocalypse on these people. I feel like it’s ultimately a story about the human condition, as most books are I guess. The book is quite introspective, following the inner worlds of the five key characters. But it also maintains some distance as an omniscient observer.
I think what I enjoy the most is the reflections of what it means to be human. I also think it was well-written. It had a pretty tight plot and I was eager to read on at the end of every chapter. But it also just had really beautiful writing. To me at least, the writing allowed me to fully immerse myself in this world and the inner worlds of the characters.
My only warning is that you should not read this book if you’re feeling depressed. I had to put down the book a couple of times because it was too sombre and dark. That’s not to say that this is any fault of the author, in fact I think it shows how impactful the book was.
⚠️ Spoilers Ahead (Full thoughts) ⚠️
BE WARNED, this next section contains spoilers for the book. Click away now if you’re still interested in reading the book for yourself.
.
.
.
✨ My Sparknotes
I recently read this post by The Honest Broker about how he takes notes on books. I thought back to my hard-core book blogging days when I would review every book I read, good or bad. While my reviews made sense at the point of writing, my attempts at keeping them spoiler-free meant that I would forget many of the details of the book that informed my opinions. The only way I could understand my reviews would be to go back and re-read the whole book again. That’s fine in some cases but what if it was a book I’d rather not read again?
So now I’m trying out taking more comprehensive book notes so I can always come back to them and reference these in case I forget the storyline and want a SparkNotes version from my perspective. If you’ve read the book, you can see how your experience differs from mine. If you haven’t, either leave now or feel free to read on for spoilers of the story.
In Station Eleven, we follow the stories of Arthur, a famous actor who dies before the apocalypse occurs and the four people who were all somehow connected to him. We follow Kirsten, a child actress at the time of the apocalypse who survives the virus and joins a travelling symphony in the post-apocalyptic world. Jeevan is the guy who tries to save Arthur when he has a heart attack on stage. Clark is a college friend of Arthur’s, an artist turned lawyer who survives the virus and started the museum at Severn City Airport because that’s what his partner would have done. Lastly, we have Miranda, Arthur’s first wife who was a shipping executive and artist working on a passion project known as “Station Eleven”. I think we actually meet all of them in the first chapter before the story branches off from there.
The Characters
Arthur is the one character who threads all of the other perspectives together. His death on stage is what links all five of the characters. They’re linked, but also not exactly? Because both Arthur and Miranda did not survive to see life after the virus. So they’re more like the jumping off point for the story.
Looking back at this now, I’m also not super sure how Jeevan plays a super crucial role in the story. Maybe he represents a person who couldn’t find his purpose in the before-times. But some time after the virus, he found his purpose/calling in the form of helping others with medical emergencies. I also felt quite sad about Jeevan’s brother who knew that he would only slow Jeevan down. Not only sad for his brother but also for Jeevan himself who had to accept that he would have to continue his journey without someone he deeply admired and certainly loved very much.
Clark is another character who didn’t seem particularly crucial to the story at first. He was a side character in Arthur’s life. I appreciated him for the perspective he brought of an older person who remembers everything about life before the virus. He has this realisation about life right before the virus hits and its a little too late. At least it wasn’t as bad as his friend at the museum who in the last moments before the global situation tanked, felt the need to update his workplace over contacting his wife and children. That guy, I really felt bad for. It made real my concerns about how lopsided our priorities seem when we’re jolted out of our routines. I feel sad that he doesn’t get to live out his simple post-apocalyptic life with his partner. But I’m happy that he started the museum at the airport and it became a place of memory. A museum, a newspaper, a travelling symphony. All these things seem unimportant in a life where survival is not guaranteed. But somehow, people are still drawn to these things. I feel like that says something about our human nature? I’m not sure.
I originally picked up the book because I thought that it was going to be a light-hearted sort of post-apocalyptic novel because of the concept of the Travelling Symphony. Who knew that the tone of the book would be so serious? I had assumed, incorrectly, that Kirsten was the main character. I don’t think she is the main, especially since there are four other characters we follow throughout the book. But she’s definitely the character who left one of the strongest impressions. I have wondered whether if I had been in her position, would I have found a way to survive? I also like her perceptiveness, and I admire her resilience, resourcefulness, and skill.
Lastly, the only other women of the main five also left a strong impression on me. While Kirsten had a rough and tough exterior, Miranda’s strength was more muted. She was portrayed as someone who would do things that were too easy for her? At least that’s how I viewed her job at the shipping company, and her time as Arthur’s first wife. After the divorce, she climbed the ranks of the company and achieved traditional career success. She also had her passion project, the graphic novel/comic known as Station Eleven.
The other story elements
Station Eleven is one of the elements that I feel like I didn’t really understand. I think the comic is supposed to mirror the situation on Earth? In the comic, civilisation had escaped to another planet and there were certain people who wanted to return to Earth as it was “before”. I’m not sure if the people from the Undersea were supposed to represent any person/group in particular in the real world though. Being the title of the novel, I feel like the comic is supposed to be really important to the story, so I feel like I’m missing out on something here. The comic definitely has something to do with how Arthur’s son Tyler eventually radicalised himself into becoming some sort of “spiritual” head. I feel like I don’t understand his motives. And perhaps it’s better that the story didn’t try to delve into it. I think his death was quite random. I also feel sad for the poor boy who thought it was better to kill himself after he got the courage to stand up to this powerful person who he didn’t want to support anymore.
While the Travelling Symphony was fleeing St. Deborah by the Water, I thought the mysterious disappearances of their members were due to the existence of a parallel universe. Perhaps they were slipping through portals in time into another universe. It was at this point that I wondered whether I was actually reading a sci-fi novel. Turns out I was not, and it was “the prophet’s” men who were silently taking out individual members of the troupe. I should have learned my lesson after reading One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Ok, at least it didn’t take me the entire book to realise that there was not going to be a sci-fi twist at the end, unlike my experience with One True Loves. 🤦♀️
There’s almost nothing I disliked about Station Eleven. Perhaps save for the fact that I might never know what had happened in the town which had figured out electricity again (i.e. the town that Kirsten and Clark see from the viewing tower at the airport). I love the atmospheric writing. I love how they were able to convey the subtleties in characters’ thoughts, actions, and emotions. I’ve compiled those that impressed me so much that I’d highlighted them. If I’m not wrong, this novel was written in a third-person limited point of view, though sometimes it seemed more like third person omniscient? But I’m not sure. It just reminded me of this critique that people had of Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (i.e. author was switching between third-person limited and third-person omniscient).
✏️ Quotes I highlighted (with some explanation)
- Chapter 3 – (Jeevan hearing about the pandemic from his friend Hua) If it had been anyone other than Hua, Jeevan wouldn’t have believed it, but he had never known a man with a greater gift for understatement. If Hua said there was an epidemic, then epidemic wasn’t a strong enough word. Jeevan was crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life. ——- > When I first read this, I wondered how the author was able to talk about a pandemic when it hadn’t happened yet. This book was published in 2014, a good six years before the pandemic of 2020 separated our modern world into a before and after. I remember thinking of people talking about a “post-covid” time when the virus hopefully dies out. But to me, I always thought that covid was a point in time and that even during the height of the pandemic, we were already post-covid. True enough, life since then has been defined by the pandemic that has shifted people’s perspectives and priorities than it would have otherwise. Perhaps its effects aren’t as everlasting as in Station Eleven’s case but it ultimately forces Earth’s inhabitants to face the philosophical question in a very real way. What is life about?
- Chapter 26 – (Clark talks to one of his target’s employees)
- …adulthood’s full of ghosts … people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another and they are just so disappointed
- They’ve done what’s expected of them. They wasn’t to do something different but it’s impossible now, there’s a mortgage, kids, whatever, they’re trapped…
- High functioning sleepwalkers, essentially. Okay, say you go into the break room, and a couple people you like are there, say someone’s telling a funny story, you laugh a little, you feel included, everyone’s so funny, you go back to your desk with a sort of, I don’t know, I guess afterglow would be the word? You go back to your desk with an afterglow, but then by four or five o’clock the day’s just turned into yet another day, and you go on like that, looking forward to five o’clock and then the weekend and then your two or three annual weeks of paid vacation time, day in day out, and that’s what happens to your life. That’s what passes for a life, I should say. That’s what passes for happiness, for most people. Guys like Dan, they’re life sleepwalkers, and nothing ever jolts them awake.
- Chapter 30 – (Jeevan thinking in his brother’s apartment) We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people ,all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt.
- Chapter 38 – (August talks about parallel universes) … given an infinite number of parallel universes, there had to be one where there had been no pandemic and he’d grown up to be a physicist as planned, or one where there had been a pandemic but the virus had had a subtly different genetic structure, some minuscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilisation hadn’t been so brutally interrupted. ——- > In fact, I live in that world today. Of course literally any other scenario could be a parallel universe of today. But the startling similarity and the proximity in time with 2020 makes this all the more chilling.
- Chapter 39 – (Miranda thinks of the past)
- She saw ghosts of herself everywhere here.
- Those previous version of herself were so distant now that remembering them was almost like remembering other people, acquaintances, young women whom she’d known a long time ago, and she felt such compassion for them.
- The memory had dimmed since she’d last retrieved it, imprecision creeping in.
- Chapter 39 – (Miranda talks of her job) Did you know that twelve percent of the world’s shipping fleet is moored fifty miles out of Singapore Harbour?
- Chapter 42 – (Clark finds out about the pandemic at the airport) It occurred to Clark that he should call someone, actually everyone, that he should call everyone he’d ever loved and talk to them and tell them all the things that mattered, but it was apparently already too late for this, his phone displaying a message he’d never seen before: SYSTEM OVERLOAD EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY
- Chapter 47 – (Clark as he aged) He liked to close his eyes and let his memories overtake him. A life, remembered, is a series of photographs and disconnected short films
- Chapter 50 – (Kirsten sees the past as she walks through old relics on the way to the airport)
- “Do you see something?” Sayid spoke in a whisper. August had been supporting him for the last mile or so, Sayid’s arm over his shoulders.
- I see everything.
- “It’s nothing,” Kirsten said.
- Chapter 52 – (Jeevan plays with his son) The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his name-sake, like Jeevan’s brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to kiss the silk of his hair. Always these memories, barely submerged.
- Chapter 53 – (Arthur reflects on his life) This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.
- Acknowledgements – I owe a debt of inspiration to Simon Parry, whose September 28, 2009, Daily Mail article “Revealed: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession Anchored Just East of Singapore” inspired the chapters of the book set in Malaysia.
P.S. If you made it this far… Welcome to the secret book club dear reader. 🥰 See you soon 💜