Emily St. John Mandel’s fourth novel, “Station Eleven,” begins with a spectacular end. One night, in a Toronto theater, onstage performing the role of King Lear, 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack. There is barely time for people to absorb this shock when tragedy on a considerably vaster scale arrives in the form of a flu pandemic so lethal that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed.
Among the people on the scene the night of Arthur’s death is Kirsten Raymonde, an 8-year-old actress playing a tiny nonspeaking role as one of Lear’s daughters as a child. (From the author’s acknowledgments, we learn that this addition to Shakespeare’s play is taken from an actual production of “Lear” staged by James Lapine in 2007 at the Public Theater.) When we meet Kirsten again, 20 years have passed and there is no more Toronto. There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.
Kirsten is now part of something called the Traveling Symphony: 20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town to town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan. At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances — mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer. “People want what was best about the world,” explains one musician. The Symphony has a motto, taken from an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager,” “Survival is insufficient,” and it is this unpoetical line — rather than, as one might expect, a quotation from Shakespeare — that Kirsten calls “my favorite line of text in the world.” Since the age of 15, she has worn it tattooed on her left forearm.
Though her memory of her own mother’s face — and of the days when such things as electricity, gas, running water, pharmaceuticals and the Internet existed — has grown vague, Kirsten has always remembered, to the point of obsession, Arthur Leander. In his prime he had been a Hollywood star, and over the years Kirsten has made a habit of searching any printed matter she happens across for articles about him — mostly celebrity gossip — which she clips and carries about with her in a zip-lock bag. Also in the bag are two much read issues of a comic-book series featuring a character called Dr. Eleven, a physicist who lives on a space station after escaping an alien takeover of Earth. Twenty years have not dimmed Kirsten’s passion for the comics, or her curiosity about their creator, identified only by the initials M.C.
From flashbacks interspersed throughout the novel, we learn about Arthur’s life — mostly the ups and downs of his acting career and of his three marriages, in particular his first, to an art school graduate named Miranda. It is she who created the Dr. Eleven comics, working on them as a hobby over many years during which she achieved professional success as an executive for a shipping company. She once made a present of the first two issues to Arthur, who in turn gave them to little Kirsten. Detailed descriptions of Miranda’s comic-book project, also interspersed throughout, reveal (perhaps a bit too pointedly, for this reader) several parallels between her science fiction stories and events in the novel itself.
The Symphony arrives in a town called St. Deborah by the Water, hoping to reunite with two members of their troupe who had stayed behind after a visit two years earlier because they were expecting a child. But neither the couple nor their child is to be found, and the Symphony is alarmed to discover that the town has come under the control of a religious fanatic known as “the prophet.” Determined to track down their missing friends, the caravan moves on, their destination a former major airport that is now home to more than 300 people and something called the Museum of Civilization, where such old-world artifacts as cellphones, laptops, credit cards and a pair of red stiletto heels are on view. But their encounter with the prophet has put Kirsten and her fellow troupers in serious danger. Their journey is threatened by a succession of misadventures, and a showdown with their enemy becomes inevitable.
Mandel is an able and exuberant storyteller, and many readers will be won over by her nimble interweaving of her characters’ lives and fates. Two other survivors whose stories are deftly tied in are Arthur’s closest male friend, who manages to find purpose in his role as an elder resident of the airport settlement, and a paramedic, first seen performing CPR on the actor on the night of his death, who yearns to make amends for a previous career as a cheap paparazzo (whose prey happened to include Arthur and Miranda).
“Station Eleven” is as much a mystery as it is a post-apocalyptic tale, and Mandel is especially good at planting clues and raising the kind of plot-thickening questions that keep the reader turning pages. Why does the prophet own a dog with the same name as a dog owned by Dr. Eleven? What is the meaning of the two black knives tattooed on Kirsten’s wrist? Who is this “V.” to whom Arthur has written a slew of letters over the years? If Mandel has to rely heavily on coincidence to bring certain parts off, she does so with satisfying panache.
Where the book falters, I think, is in its imagination of disaster. Having accepted the science that says a flu pandemic is highly probable in our future, Mandel chooses a worst possible situation, a plague that results in the immediate and total collapse of civilization. But the survivors do not think, act or speak like people struck by such a cataclysm. For the most part, they do not behave very differently from people living in ordinary, civilized times. Hunger, thirst and exhaustion are alluded to, but there is no penetrating sense of the day-to-day struggle of vulnerable human beings lacking the basic amenities of life. Also, although we are presented with a significant villain in the figure of the prophet, readers may wonder why few bad guys appear to have made it to Year 20.
We are living in a time that has been extraordinary for outbreaks of violence and chaos all over the world, when news of carnage in places like Ukraine, Nigeria and the Middle East, and of the horrendous conditions that have turned tens of thousands of Central American children into desperate migrants, has been overwhelming. Reading Mandel’s novel, I did not feel as if I was in the presence of that kind of suffering. The hairs never rose on the back of my neck; my eyes never filled with tears.
Survival may indeed be insufficient, but does it follow that our love of art can save us? If “Station Eleven” reveals little insight into the effects of extreme terror and misery on humanity, it offers comfort and hope to those who believe, or want to believe, that doomsday can be survived, that in spite of everything people will remain good at heart, and that when they start building a new world they will want what was best about the old.