Station Eleven

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel is a different type of dystopian novel to those I have read previously. We jump around through time beginning on the night where a flu pandemic takes hold in America, moving forward up to twenty years after 99% of the world's human population has been wiped out, and moving back to well before the disaster primarily through the life of a Hollywood actor, Arthur, and his wives.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading the chillingly realistic pandemic scenes describing the initial panics, blocked highways and overcrowded hospitals (and that aeroplane). The restarting timeline as civilisation begins to collapse was an effective device with elements such as the internet vanishing after so many days, electric lights going out forever, gasoline becoming unusable after Year Five - did you know that gasoline has a shelf life? The idea of survivors just walking and walking resonated particularly well as we see similar scenes right now of refugees escaping war in exactly the same way.

I was less impressed by pre-pandemic scenes, especially Arthur's pampered life and the time dedicated to describing the dystopian comics created by his first wife, Miranda. I understand their inclusion but didn't feel that they warranted so much attention. There is also excessive repetition in Station Eleven which got irritating in the latter half of the book and I felt that tighter editing could have been beneficial.

There was a lot in this I really enjoyed. Interesting characters and a fascinating set of situations, all very tightly plotted and woven together in a system that slowly became visible throughout the novel. The structure and style of it has a lot of similarities to The Passage - something the book slyly acknowledges at one point.
However, I can only give this four and not five stars because the ending - or, more accurately, the climactic point of the narrative - feels too short and brief, almost perfunctory in the way it happens. When I was getting towards the end, I was thinking that I'd missed something in the blurb and this was just the first book of a pair or a series. There was enough going on and being built up I couldn't see how it could be resolved in that space - and I'm not sure it was, leaving me a bit empty when it finished.