Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the evening that renowned Hollywood actor Arthur Leander suffered a heart attack while doing King Lear on stage. A catastrophic flu pandemic struck the city that evening, and within a few weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.
Twenty years later, Kirsten travels with a small group of actors and musicians between the towns in the transformed globe. They go by the name The Traveling Symphony and are committed to preserving what is left of humanity and the arts. However, as they go to St. Deborah by the Water, they run into a violent prophet who will put the small band’s survival in danger.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
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The peculiar twist of fate that unites them all will be revealed as the novel progresses, shifting back and forth in time and vividly describing life before and after the pandemic.
Before most people are aware of this terrible infection, the story starts. Jeevan, a trained paramedic and former paparazzi photographer, gets a call from a buddy telling him to stock up on food and seek refuge in quarantine. The narrative is broken up across chapters that take place before and after the epidemic, much like in everyone’s life. The young actress Kirsten, who was eight years old when the virus hit, has very few memories of her early years. She is a member of a touring company of Shakespearean actors after the pandemic.
Doctor Eleven has relocated to Station Eleven, a space station the size of a small planet that is almost entirely submerged in water, after the destruction of Earth. (He adopted the station’s name as his own.) He fights there against the evil Undersea forces that killed Lonagan, his mentor and the station’s former commander.
That wasn’t a storyline summary. It’s the plot of a series of graphic books written over several years by Miranda Carroll, one of the main figures in the complex web of occasions St. John Mandel describes in her captivating book. Even though they initially seem irrelevant to the plot, comic books continue to appear throughout the novel’s protagonists’ stories and end up serving as a connecting thread.
The main character of Station Eleven is an A-list Hollywood actor named Arthur Leander, as well as a number of other characters whose paths he crosses before the Collapse. Act IV of theatre production in Toronto with Leander as King Lear ends with his passing due to a heart attack. Jeevan Chaudhary, a student paramedic, immediately runs onto the stage from the audience but is unable to save him. Kirsten Raymonde, one of three 8-year-old girls who had been playing small, quiet roles in the performance, sees the catastrophe. In the meantime, a dangerous influenza variant known as the Georgian Flu has been wiping out populations in Georgia and Russia and is now spreading quickly throughout the world on planes carrying pandemic refugees. Only a few days before the sickness spreads to North America, Arthur passed away.
