Station Eleven
Post apocalyptic drama and novel are all in rage these days. A possible reason for this phenomena is probably to do with the wide possibility of imagination and dramatic settings which are possible once the civilization collapses.
Post-apocalyptic scenarios are fascinating and I would definitely love to live in them. Life would be cool except for not being able to watch GIFs of cute kittens falling over all the time, retrievers trying to be lap dogs, arguing with random strangers on reddit, not being able to binge on Netflix, play video games, fly from one place to another, no electricity yada yada. Well, scrap that, life would be terrible. I take back my words. Most of us lazy farts would not last a day in such a harsh world.
I managed to finish reading this book 4 months after it was released, which is not bad. To make it very clear, this book isn’t a dystopia or zombie infested world, but just a post-apocalypse where over 99% of the world’s population is decimated by a flu.
The author Emily St John Mandel has a very fluid and catchy writing which feels like an excellent prose. The book contains multiple parallel stories jumping forward and back in time explaining how their life unfolded just months before the pandemic and the life they had to live after more than a decade.
The book centers around a Hollywood celebrity and actor who dies in the opening of the book. It should not be surprising that he had multiple failed marriages and secretly he considered his life to be somewhat of failure. The night he died, they had to call his lawyer to figure out who should be contacted about his death, which explains the complications of his life. The first two of his wives play an important role in his life and also in the story of this novel.
In book also touches on the work ethics and lifestyle of paparazzi and how they have to use sleazy, deceptive and sometimes outright horrid practices to stay in the game. It seems like a game of ever diminishing moral values, if there ever was any.
There’s a prophet who calls himself the light and calls his people the righteous people because they were saved by God during the pandemic. Given that there are hundreds of godmen fooling people and making money all over the world and having their followers create lavish temples for their cult. Now imagine a world where education is a luxury, the world is no longer connected via the internet for fact-checking, access to books is a status symbol and you get a world where lots of people can fall to the fraudsters who claim to be the voice of God, a beacon in the world of darkness or who can decipher the true meaning of the Book of Revelation.
What I find surprising it that people preferred Shakespeare plays over most of the other theatrical performances after the pandemic. The traveling symphony consisted of lots of kids who travelled from city to city performing the plays and earning their living. Sometimes it is even possible to follow your profession being a stage actor after the civilization has collapsed, the other profession who survives all the time is scamming people of their money by claiming to be a voice of God.
Arthur’s ex-wife and his close friend Clarke, take a flight during the pandemic and end up stranded in an Airport. After months, they make the airport as their home, improvise a living system with security trays for holding water, jets for sleeping and other smart things we expect from educated people. Clarke and other people started collecting items from the civilization like Credit Cards, Driver’s License, iPad, red stilettos pumps, laptops etc and named it Museum of Civilization.
If you were hoping for a linear story with a nice ending, you would be deeply disappointed. It would seem like an critique piece on the social structures of humans before the pandemic and how humans have adjusted to their life in the crumbled civilization. The debate whether kids should be taught about the glory days and if these things would make them depressed or whether truth should not be concealed from them. It’s a shot at godmen who claim to exploit gullible people and an essay on how comic books influence and shape our opinions and outlook.
