I read a million reviews of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven on this site, so I finally found myself a copy. Y’all were right — this was a good read!
“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”
A super flu hits the world and wipes out just about everyone. 20 years later, Kristen and her band of musicians/actors travel North America, putting on performances for the small pockets of civilization that still exist. Then they return to one town that has changed immensely in just a few years — a prophet has taken over and things have gone very, very wrong.
Station Eleven moves around a bit in time and space, jumping from before the super flu that wiped out the entire world (I’ve read like, three books that started with a super flu in the last six weeks — how does that happen?) to after, switching from the story of Arthur the actor to Jeevan the paramedic/paparazzo to Kristen the actress, back and forth. I liked some parts more than others — uncovering Arthur’s history, what happened to him prior to the world ending, interested me more than the actual end of the world stuff — but the author does a great job of tying it all together in the end.
The writing style — particularly after the end of the world — takes some getting used to. It’s very fluid, many of the characters are not named, but rather referred to by the part they play within the group (the tuba, the conductor, etc.). It’s a little strange, but works well within the strangeness of this new world.
Actually that was the one thing that quite never convinced me; that some of the characters were referred to by name and others by instrument. I suppose it supposed to illustrate the fluidity of the Group. It just didn’t feel fleshed out enough to be believable, the rest of the troupe was written like a Family, wouldn’t you call Family members by their names?