Station Eleven -- Calamity, Serendipity, Six Degrees of Separation, and more..

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is, simplistically, a dystopian novel -- definitely not my favorite genre. Perhaps one of the dystopia scenarios might very possibly occur in my lifetime (probably not the zombie kind) and I should therefore face up to the reality. But I find most novels in this genre to be unrelentingly humorless and grim. I prefer grim reality served up with a human touch and some people that I care about. Thank you ESJMl!

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at a stoplight in my very responsible Prius hybrid, I look around me and marvel. How could we have evolved to live like this? Tall buildings, cars, electricity, cell phones, books, television, social media... A thousand years ago, we were very different, at least as a culture. Our lives today were unimaginable back then, or even 150 years ago. We've evolved culturally to be so specialized that few of us have the expertise to recreate even one element of all the technologies that define our lives.

That's an important premise of Mandel's novel. Her description of the post-apocalyptic world -- after the catastrophic pandemic wiped out 99% of our race -- is understated and matter-of-fact, but effective. Imagine a world without any modern conveniences or modern necessities. No medicines of any kind, including simple things like insulin that keep thousands of people alive every day. Imagine a world without electricity, running water, gasoline, heat or air conditioning. No television, no Internet, no telephone. She doesn't fill in all the blanks of how the survivors cope without all those things, but with her springboard, your mind easily takes you there.

With her lightly but effectively drawn dystopian world as a canvas, Mandel depicts the before and the after for a handful of characters, loosely connected (six degrees of separation) through an aging actor. The story goes back and forth, from just Before, to just After, to Year Ten and (mostly) Year Twenty. The intermingling of the characters' lives is serendipitous, as is their survival of the initial disaster.

As with any good novel, Mandel does an outstanding job of putting you in the shoes and in the heads of her characters. You can begin to appreciate what it might be like to be an apocalyptic survivor. And you are left wondering what it really means to be civilized.

An excellent read!