Book Journeys: Station Eleven

I don't often read new releases and, yes, I count a book printed in 2014 as a relatively new release. I tend to instead spend my time catching up on classics, favourite authors, graphic novels, and the NSW HSC Prescriptions List (No, no, I've never actually claimed to be fun at parties).

Last year I returned to a much-loved hobby, reading while walking. This has led to a strange series of synchronous coincidences in which the weather coincided with my reading experience. In the last four months:

• I read The Shipping News, about life on an island, while walking the coastline of Stanwell Park. 
• Journey to the Stone Country, about the sparse rocky inland of Northern Queensland, read while sweltering in the dry heat of our recent and devastating Australian summer. 
• And then there was Island Home, Tim Winton's nature-inspired memoir of growing up alongside fragile and unsung ecosystems such as the heath-lands of south-west Australia, which I read while walking the semi-developed swamps of Werrington.

Okay, that last one is a stretch, but spare a thought for the romantic in me. 

Less romantic is the COVID-19 pandemic that currently casts a pallid silence over the world. I picked up Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel for no reason other than the fact that I liked the minimalist design of the cover, and metaphorically gasped as I walked my quietening neighbourhood a month ago and came to the realisation that I was reading a post-apocalyptic story that described in scarily accurate detail what the world might look like after a devastating pandemic wipes out the majority of humanity. 

It took me four walks to read Station Eleven from start to finish, and it's the sort of book that made me want to keep on walking. It's a compelling read, with easily-read prose that belies certain complexities. For a start, St. John Mandel (is that the whole last name? I'm never sure) utilises a non-linear structure to encapsulate fifty years of events, four or five protagonists, and layers of meaning that keep you thinking long after the novel has ended. 

In a way this is a book about the importance of art in the face of tragedy and cataclysm. Relevant, huh? In Station Eleven, a single piece of amateur art is used to form the thematic core of the entire narrative; a suggestion that art's relevance is entirely dependent on its significance to the reader. This is further exemplified by the text's equal use of examples from both high culture (Shakespeare, Beethoven) and low culture (the remnants of pop culture that still persist, with the Star Trek: Voyager quote "Survival is insufficient" taking centrestage). The text circles around these ideas and doubles-back in multiple ways, employing dramatic irony ("one day she'll show it to the world and we'll all say we knew her when"), symbolism (the eponymous comic that holds the various threads of the different time periods together), and metatextuality ("You don't have to understand it, it's mine").

It's a beautiful and breathtaking piece of accessible science fiction that asks big questions about religion, survival, art, and humanity. How could anyone say no to that?