Station Eleven

Hey everyone, here’s a very quick, spoiler-free post on why I found Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven disappointing. I actually read the whole thing before I decided to review it this time!

For 90% of my time with the book, I actually thought I was going to come away from it feeling quite positive. Then I got to what I guess passes for the climax of the book, and that changed quickly.

The story takes place before and after an apocalyptic flu pandemic (the opening chapters are great if you want to flash back to early 2020 and feel really anxious), with initially-disconnected characters and plot threads that are gradually intertwined, in your typical literary fiction “people’s lives connect across space and time in unexpected and beguiling ways” (85% of all literary fiction is about this). As far as those kinds of stories go it’s pretty well done, especially in the second half when the different threads start coming together.

However, having gone to all the work of setting this up, the pay-off is extremely underwhelming. The climactic action of the story comes really abruptly and is dealt with in the space of a few pages, via means that don’t really have anything to do with the protagonist or any of the plot elements established up to that point–even though (and this is the part that kills me) the scene in question does actually bring in all of those elements, in a way that seems like it’s going to really tightly wrap up all the book’s thematic strands. They’re just not relevant at all to what actually happens.

The impression I get is that Mandel was fed up with the story and wanted to wrap it up even though the story seemed like it had enough fuel to keep going for a lot longer. At the point it goes into the climax, it felt like there was another third of the book still left to go.

Station Eleven got a TV series adaptation recently which, going by the episode descriptions, seems to flesh out the ending much more as well as tying one particular character more tightly into the rest of the plot, so apparently I’m not the only person who noticed these problems.