Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven

To be clear, I don't regret bailing on my Substack. If it's your place of choice, good for you, but it didn't work for me (and not only because of their ongoing Nazi problem, but ...).

I mention it here only to explain that in my zeal to depart, I deleted some reviews there that I had neglected to upload here, one of them being my review of Emily St. John Mandel's Sea of Tranquility. We're here to talk about Station Eleven, instead, but let me just say briefly that I really did love Sea of Tranquility. It was slender rather than substantial, gesturing toward ideas that I would've read patiently at vastly more length, but I found it a deeply satisfying read.

And now, I've belatedly gotten around to the earlier Station Eleven, the footprint of which was all over Mandel's COVID-era Sea of Tranquility, since one of the characters there had written a very successful novel about a pandemic only a few years before the planet was struck by a pandemic.

Yep, Station Eleven is a pandemic novel, written and published only a few years before COVID. It reminded me of my beloved Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and of course McCarthy's The Road, plus George Stewart's classic The Earth Abides, plus some of its characters echo at you from Mandel's other novels, but this one does stand alone.

Station Eleven is more plot-heavy than I'd prefer, so I don't know how much to say here without giving away too much. In complicated ways, it turns out that the world is smaller than one thinks that it is, so a lot of threads come together toward as the novel progresses. Some of the characters, too, come from a small island between Vancouver Island and the BC mainland, which is a great Easter egg for some readers. This is a vastly more intense pandemic than we experienced with COVID, but there's hope regardless, and the journey is pretty terrific.

Firmly recommended.