Can you find hope after a life-changing pandemic? Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven says yes
Actor Michael Greyeyes is championing Station Eleven on Canada Reads, which takes place March 27-30
When Emily St. John Mandel set out to write a book about artists trying to eke out a living from their craft, it turned into a post-apocalyptic novel.
Station Eleven takes place on an Earth undone by disease, following the interconnected lives of several characters — actors, artists and those closest to them — before and after the plague. One travels the wasteland performing Shakespearean plays with a troupe, while another attempts to build community at an abandoned airport and another amasses followers for a dangerous cause.
The B.C.-born author told The Next Chapter's Shelagh Rogers she has been on a "really wonderful, surprising and surreal ride" since the book's 2014 release.
Station Eleven has been translated into 31 languages, was adapted into a limited television series for HBO Max and showed up on a string of awards lists, including winning the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award and being nominated for a 2014 National Book Award.
The success of the novel enabled Mandel to quit her day job as an administrative assistant and write full-time in New York and Los Angeles. Since then, her novel The Glass Hotel was a finalist for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and her most recent novel, Sea of Tranquility, is a finalist for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award and was one of two Canadian books on Barack Obama's list of favourite books of 2022.
Now, the ride continues: Station Eleven is being championed on Canada Reads 2023 by actor, dancer, director and choreographer Michael Greyeyes.
The great Canadian book debate will take place on March 27-30. The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem and on CBC Books.
Shakespeare after the apocalypse
"I knew I wanted to write about the life of an actor. I was really interested in the idea of what it means to devote your life to your art. I thought it would be a quiet, literary novel about an actor in present-day Canada," she explained to Rogers in 2015 in an interview on The Next Chapter.
At first, the author felt inspired by the questions and conversations she had as she juggled multiple day jobs to support herself while writing. But, amid the minutiae and marathon grind, Mandel says her focus turned to the awe she feels for the world we live in, a time she referred to as "the age of miracles" in a recent conversation with Canada Reads panellist Michael Greyeyes.
I wanted to write about this extraordinary place and time in which we find ourselves. One way to write about something is to write about its absence.- Emily St. John Mandel
"You read the headlines and, of course, a lot of things about this world are absolutely unspeakable and appalling, but [...] we are surrounded by a level of infrastructure and technology that at any other point in human history would have seemed absolutely miraculous," Mandel said in her 2015 interview with Rogers.
"I wanted to write about this extraordinary place and time in which we find ourselves. One way to write about something is to write about its absence."
In the post-apocalypse of Mandel's imagination, it's important to take stock of the moths that flutter beside porch lights or the look of a town from the perspective of an airplane window in the sky. The author spends several paragraphs in the book writing out an "incomplete list" of what no longer exists. It includes no more concert stages lit by "candy-coloured halogens," no more ball games under floodlights and no more "diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below."
Through this lens, the post-apocalypse genre becomes a way of meditating on the best of what our world has to offer and imagining what we might attempt to recreate in its absence. For Mandel, that includes the work of William Shakespeare — hence why some of her characters are intent on performing Shakespearean plays.
"I was thinking about Station Eleven as a love letter to the modern world, written in the form of a requiem," the author told Rogers in 2015.
"It is an elegy to a world that hasn't vanished yet, but will."
LISTEN | Emily St. John Mandel speaks with Shelagh Rogers in 2015:
Finding hope in dystopia
The 2014 requiem took on new relevance when COVID-19 hit. Mandel weathered the pandemic in New York City where she said it became "disorienting" watching what she had researched for a book become reality.
"It turns out it's one thing to travel around the U.S. giving a lecture that contains the line, 'there will always be another pandemic,' which I had been doing for years; it's something quite different to experience that reality," she said on The Next Chapter in February 2023.
While the novel bears a prescient quality, Station Eleven is still a work of speculative fiction. In fact, in conversation with Greyeyes, Mandel said she considers the work a hopeful read somewhat counter to the tropes she feels have come to define the post-apocalyptic genre.
"Around the time I started writing Station Eleven, it seemed that the genre was basically just horror set after the end of the world," the author said to Greyeyes.
"So often post-apocalyptic novels, films or TV series are set in the immediate aftermath of the end of the world — this period of absolute mayhem, chaos and horror. It's not that I don't think that would happen — I think it absolutely would. [But] it's not plausible to me that that would last forever, at least not everywhere on Earth, because that's not sustainable."
There is a lot of hope in thinking of that idea of the next world after the horror.- Emily St. John Mandel
Mandel says she made a conscious decision to shift the timeline in Station Eleven.
"Maybe it's more interesting to think: what's the next world? What does the world look like 15 to 20 years later? Maybe there might be space for a travelling theatre troupe or a group of musicians," the author told the book's Canada Reads champion, Michael Greyeyes.
Despite the dystopic event she refers to as "the collapse" in her book, Station Eleven is not a diatribe on the world's failings.
"I think a lot of people will not read a pandemic novel, which I absolutely get after the three years we've just had [...] but it is a hopeful story and there is a lot of hope in thinking of that idea of the next world after the horror," Mandel told Greyeyes.
LISTEN | Emily St. John Mandel on Station Eleven in a COVID-19 world:
Through the looking glass and onto Canada Reads
Reflecting with Rogers about what it means for Station Eleven to be championed on Canada Reads 2023, Mandel said, "the life this book has had has been absolutely extraordinary."
"All these years later, there is still this through-the-looking-glass feeling of having stepped out into this upside-down world where people have actually read my work, which is not something I ever saw coming with my first three novels."
Soon, that feeling will magnify when readers from across Canada tune in to watch Greyeyes champion Station Eleven.
Greyeyes is a Nêhiyaw actor, choreographer and director from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation. The multi-hyphenate artist has been performing for over 30 years, first as a dancer then as an actor.
He told Q with Tom Power that he is championing Station Eleven, in part, because the story is "an extraordinary journey into the things that hold us together — into our dreams and the things so dear to us we cannot leave them behind."
What will Canada take from a post-pandemic novel given our current times? For Mandel, there's always hope.
WATCH | Emily St. John Mandel and Michael Greyeyes discuss Station Eleven and their love for dystopian fiction:
Mandel's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
