![]() What mightn’t come to mind as immediately is a story about a travelling Shakespeare troupe wandering the North American continent decades after the actual apocalypse has struck, which is exactly the story that Mandel tells in Station Eleven. While post-apocalyptic tales tend to focus on the action around the impact of a fictional disaster, Mandel’s novel speaks to the attitudes and characteristics of people which drive any action that occurs. She interrogates central questions about human society, inviting readers to consider what human qualities can endure even an apocalypse, what qualities are timeless. Characters A tale of two timelines: part one “…once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. Part of the novel’s ambition is that while it’s set 20 years after the apocalyptic Georgia Flu, it constantly reaches decades into the past to search for meaning. In particular, the novel’s central character is Arthur Leander, an actor whose death coincides with the breakout of the Flu. Tracing his origins from obscurity to fame, Mandel juxtaposes his philandering and untrustworthy behaviour with repeated attempts to be a better person, or perhaps just be more true to himself, before his death. We’ll eventually see that many of his actions have consequences years into the future.Īrguably equally important in legacy is his first wife, Miranda Carroll, whose comics lend the novel its title. Take this with a grain of salt-she’s kind of my favourite character-but the time and energy she invests in the Station Eleven comics are arguably the most valuable investment of the novel. Her comics survive her in the years following the Flu, and are a source of escape and purpose for others just as they had been for herself.īoth of these characters come into contact with Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo and journalist who regularly follows Arthur though his career, photographing Miranda in a vulnerable moment before her divorce, and booking an interview with Arthur years later as he plans to leave his second wife Elizabeth Colton. We see Jeevan struggle with his purpose in life throughout the novel, though it can be said that he ultimately finds it after the Flu, when he is working as a medic.įinally, there’s Clark Thompson, Arthur’s friend from college who remains loyal, though not necessarily uncritical, of him all throughout his life. A tale of two timelines: part two “I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”Īll of this finally puts us in a position to think analytically about characters in the ‘present’ timeline, that is, 20 years after the Flu.Īs the Flu first arrives in America, Clark is just leaving for Toronto, but a Flu outbreak there causes his flight to be redirected to Severn City Airport, where he and others miraculously survive in what will become a key setting of the novel. ![]() We experience the present mostly through the perspective of Kirsten Raymonde, a performer who survived the Flu as a young child. She travels with the Travelling Symphony with others such as Alexandra, August and the conductor-they have collectively adopted the motto, “survival is insufficient.” Because she was so young when it happened, many of the traumas she experienced have been erased by her mind, and she struggles to piece together what she lost in a quest for identity and meaning, largely driven by her vague memories of Arthur. Through the story, they are pursued by the prophet, later revealed to be Tyler Leander, the child of Arthur and Elizabeth who survived and grew up in the decades following the Flu outbreak. ![]() A religious extremist, he becomes the leader of a cult of fanatics who amass weapons and conquer towns by force. ![]()
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