I wanted to like this more than I did. And I did enjoy it, but I was expecting more after having read Sea of Tranquility and seeing how much other Cannonballers like this one.
Station Eleven alternates settings between when a flu pandemic starts and 20 years later in the post-apocalyptic world. In the future, Kirsten, one of the main characters, is an actor in The Traveling Symphony, a group of actors and musicians who travel from small town to small town to perform for the residents. She was about 8 when the pandemic started, and it’s linked in her mind to the death of actor Arthur Leander, with whom she was performing King Lear, and he had a heart attack on stage the night the pandemic hit the United States.
The writing was a little bit choppy at times. There are a lot of sentence fragments, though I assume they serve a stylistic literary purpose for St. John Mandel. It wasn’t particularly jarring, but it was noticeable. I don’t recall her writing this way in Sea of Tranquility, though I could be misremembering. It’s hard not to make comparisons to Sea of Tranquility and also to The Passage, another post-apocalyptic novel with an ensemble cast and visits to different time periods. However, I don’t often read post-apocalypse fiction, so maybe these elements are pretty common across the genre.
Arthur is part of that ensemble cast and is connected to a few people who are important to the novel in various ways, but I found him to be the least interesting character. He’s an aging, rich, white (I think? I assume?), male actor, and there isn’t anything particularly captivating about him or his story. His presence is important because of how it affects other characters, but each time there was a section from his perspective, I was just waiting to get to the next one. That’s part of what dropped my rating for this novel. The ending also seemed a little abrupt, and I was a bit surprised about the character whose perspective it ended on; they weren’t the person I expected it to end with.
I was definitely entertained throughout my reading of the novel. I wanted to know what happened next, which made it hard to put the book down. It was a perfectly good read. It’s just not what I was hoping for.
