Wednesday 22 April 2020

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel


My good friend Joe the Gardener and I have a saying for those multi skilled people with a mastery of several crafts. ‘We want him on the boat’. This is the ark of people who will create civilisation out of the ruins of the old. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel has no one of any practical capacity. All are pond skaters, useless urban barbarians who imagine that their aesthetic sensibility is enough. Kirstan a central character has Because survival is insufficient tattooed on her arm. She is a member of the Travelling Symphony troupe who perform music and the plays of Shakespeare. That’s nice but outside forces, alchemists quite capable of making gunpowder and melting down lead flashing for bullets, would soon overwhelm them,. Within months of the pandemic’s 99% fatality individuals would be generating electricity. Robinson Crusoe taught us that with a few tools you could transform a wilderness into a garden. Mandel has them getting bored with venison but wearing ragged clothes. Nice writing and a weaving of various stories but realisation macramé.

As a map of a post pandemic world it is light as the froth on your latte.


2 comments:

john doyle said...

I remember having written something about Station Eleven but I don't remember where, probably embedded in some old email correspondence. I recall wondering why the survivors had to keep eating canned goods when surrounded by plenty of cultivated crops and herd animals available for eating -- or maybe that was my complaint about The Walking Dead. Also as you observe, it was odd that the illness would show such discriminating taste, killing off the useful while sparing the aesthetes. I did like the idea of setting base camp in an airport, a place that's neither here nor there.

ombhurbhuva said...

I read that it’s going to be made into a movie. Tattooed Killer Chick Kirstan, a producer could see that but the music? A tag line: when survival is not sufficient.