Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

"I still think you invented the parallel-universe theory," she said, but one of the few things that August didn't know about her was that sometimes when she looked at her collection of pictures she tried to imagine and place herself in that other, shadow life.  You walk into a room and flip a switch and the room fills with light.  You leave your garbage in cans on the curb, and a truck comes and transports it to some invisible place.  When you're in danger, you call for the police.  Hot water pours from faucets.   Lift a receiver or press a button on a telephone, and you can speak to anyone.  All of the information in the world is on the Internet, and the Internet is all around you, drifting through the air like pollen on a summer breeze.  There is money, slip[s of paper that can be traded for anything: houses, boats, perfect teeth.  There are dentists.  She tried to imagine this life playing out somewhere at the present moment.  Some parallel Kirsten in an air-conditioned room, waking from an unsettling dream of walking through an empty landscape.

As a child, Kirsten Raymonde is a a child actor appearing in a production of King Lear.  She watches the lead actor, a film star named Arthur Leander, have a heart attack and die on stage.  This human-sized tragedy is soon overshadowed by a colossal one: an epidemic called the Georgia Flu decimates the world's population--actually, much more than decimates, killing 99% of people--and soon the world as we know it has disappeared.  Twenty or so years later, Kirsten becomes part of a Traveling Symphony who wanders the shores of Michigan playing music and performing Shakespeare for the small communities that remain.

The Traveling Symphony is an attempt to salvage something of the old world.  Audiences seem to respond to Shakespeare specifically, because it reminds them of the long thread of tradition and history that in many other ways seems to have been completely severed.  In a parallel plotline, another man, residing in the airport to which is plane had been diverted those two decades ago, builds a Museum of Civilization in the glass cases of a food kiosk, full of cell phones and iPads.  I didn't intend it, but it made an interesting companion piece to Philip K. Dick's Dr. Bloodmoney, which is also about the way civilization might remake itself in the face of nuclear disaster.  For Dick, what is held onto most desperately is not Shakespeare or orchestral music but something more like a midcentury version of the glass cases of the Museum of Civilization: radio, cigarettes, VFW halls.

But the collapse of civilization also means, among the survivors, darker impulses go unchecked by the social order.  "Ferals" wander through the woods, and Kirsten herself has two knives tattooed on her wrist to memorialize two men she has had to kill.  The Symphony encounters a "prophet" who collects wives and rules his small community by violence, and when one of his pre-teen "wives" stows away with them, they find themselves stalked by his malevolence.  The prophet, spoiler alert, in a "twist" I really hated, is actually the actor Arthur Leander's son, who was on a plane en route to Toronto for his father's funeral when it was diverted.  Like Kirsten, his worldview is informed by a series of comic books written by Arthur's first wife Miranda about a brilliant scientist who lives in a satellite, estranged from his home.  (Symbolism time!)

I'm sad to say I just didn't buy the prophet at all.  Besides the hokey "we're all connected" nature of the timeline, it's never clear exactly what animates him, beyond malice and greed.  His mother, Leander's second wife, is intensely religious in a way that rubs off on her son, Tyler.  They both insist on believing that "things happen for a reason," and it's a short jump from there to the belief that those who survived the Georgia Flu are in some way blessed.  This felt like a missed opportunity, to me, to explore the self-serving elements of modern Calvinism that encourage people to imagine their luck or privilege as a kind of divine providence.  But even a zealot would be forced to acknowledge it's true of all survivors, so the prophet Tyler's exclusionary violence don't really make sense.  Nor is it clear what exactly the nature of his "prophecy" is.  In the place of a coherent theology that responds to the end of the world Mandel offers a collection of "cult" markers drawn from pop culture sources: the multiple wives, a smattering of Revelation, marking acolytes by scarification.  None of this followers seem to be true believers, and who can blame them?  There's not really a belief here.

That was one of my two major misgivings about Station Eleven.  The other one is this: only about a quarter of the narrative takes place after the collapse of civilization.  The rest of it is the story of Arthur Leander's life, told in flashback.  The conflicts of these sections--intrusive paparazzi, serial divorce, the difference between Leander's life as a star and his childhood in small town British Columbia--seem so divorced from the post-apocalyptic sections that it's hard to believe the plotlines really "tie together," as the novel seems to want.   Worse, it makes the novel seem fatally uninterested in its own story, as if, like the audience of the Traveling Symphony, it wants to luxuriate in the past instead of living in the present.  Brent said something about modern science fiction being "ashamed of science fiction," and that's not too far off here: Station Eleven often seems like a jejune realist novel about bourgeois dissatisfaction posing as a sci-fi adventure.