Interviews
A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel, Author of Station Eleven
What is Station Eleven about? What is the significance of the title?
Station Eleven is about a traveling Shakespearean theatre company in a post-apocalyptic North America. It's also about friendship, love, what it means to devote a life to art, what remains when civilization crumbles, music, oppressive dinner parties, and knife-throwing.
The narrative moves back and forth in time between the years leading up to a societal collapse, and a point in time twenty years later, when the traveling company moves between the settlements of the altered world, performing Shakespeare and music. Station Eleven is the title of a comic book that one of the actors, Kirsten, carries with her on the road. It was given to her as a little girl, just before the world ended, and she's held on to it ever since. It's the object that connects the two time periods in the book, and I suppose one could also see it as a stand-in for the burden of memory that these characters carry with them. Most of them retain some recollection of what the world was like before the collapse, and the more they remember of that lost world, the more they've lost.
Station Eleven is a departure from your past works of fiction. What inspired you to write a post-apocalyptic novel?
It was partly just that I wanted to write something different from my previous books. My first three novels were generally categorized as literary noir, and as much as I love that genre, I didn't want to be pigeonholed as a crime writer—not because I have anything against crime fiction or crime writers, just because I don't want to be pigeonholed as anything. It was also partly that I wanted to write a love letter to the modern world—the high-speed trains, internet, antibiotics, electricity, cell phones, all of these wonderfully useful things that we take for granted. I've always loved post-apocalyptic novels, and it occurred to me that one way to consider the modern world would be to write about its absence.
The novel opens with the death of a famous actor from an apparent heart attack, mid-performance of King Lear. That same night, the reader witnesses the beginning of a flu pandemic that wipes out all but a few pockets of civilization. Why did you choose to feature this scene, and this play, as a catalyst of sorts to the world's demise?
I chose that opening partly for technical reasons—I wanted to open the book with a gripping scene—and partly because King Lear is a play that's deeply concerned with loss, and a play about losing everything seemed a fitting way to usher out the pre-pandemic world. I liked the idea of a theatre full of people who have no idea that these are the last few hours before the world comes undone. By the morning the news will be full of this overwhelming pandemic, within a week the city will have shut down, but first they had this experience together in a beautiful theatre on the last normal night of their lives.
Fifteen years after the pandemic, the reader is introduced to "The Traveling Symphony," a troupe that roams the desolate landscape of the upper Midwest performing Shakespeare plays to small groups of survivors. Left in a world without electricity, without running water, without contemporary luxuries, the troupe lives by the slogan, "survival is insufficient." Explain what inspired you to create the group, and why you chose to focus on Shakespeare in particular.
This book changed a great deal between the time I started thinking about it and the final execution, but it always involved a company of Shakespearean actors. I'd originally thought the book would be about the life of an actor in a scrappy-but-underfunded touring Shakespearean theatre troupe in Canada. Later I changed the setting to a post-apocalyptic North America, but the troupe remained. It seemed to me that people would want what was best about the world, and for me, what was best about the world would include the plays of William Shakespeare.
For the first few drafts, I had the company performing plays from different eras, even teleplays, but that started to seem a little incongruous: I had this company traveling over a desolate landscape, performing episodes of Seinfeld and How I Met Your Mother to communities of people who lived without electricity, and it just didn't quite make sense. Those works are products of the modern world, and of course, in a post-apocalyptic scenario you're no longer in the modern world; you're back in the age of candlelight.
Also, it seemed to me that there are some interesting parallels between Shakespeare's time and the post-pandemic era about which I was writing, so as I continued revising Station Eleven, it began to seem more and more natural that the company would focus exclusively on Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's era, theatre was often a matter of traveling companies moving from town to town, performing by candlelight. Also, he lived in a time and a place that was haunted by recurring episodes of bubonic plague, and you see it here and there in his texts. You've mentioned in interviews that you wrote Station Eleven as a "love letter to our world right now." When writing the novel, what did you determine that you would miss most about your everyday life?
Electricity and running water. Also, modern dentistry, in the absence of which I would have lost almost all of my teeth by now. Why did you choose to set most of the post-apocalyptic part of your novel in the Midwest and life beforehand mainly in Toronto? Why these two places specifically?
A year or so before I started working on this book, I went on a book tour in Michigan. There were a couple of stops along the lakeshore—Brilliant Books in Sutton Bay, although they've since moved to Traverse City, and McLean & Eakin in Petoskey—and I fell in love with the area. It's a beautiful part of the world, with excellent bookstores. I knew I wanted to set something there, just because I liked it so much. When I started writing Station Eleven, the lakeshore struck me as an ideal location for my traveling company, for tedious practical reasons having to do with continuous proximity to fresh water.
I've been interested in writing about Toronto for a while. I like that city a great deal, and I was there from ages eighteen through twenty-two, which are obviously very formative years. Also, I had a strange experience there once, and this is no reflection on Toronto, but it might have marked the first time I started thinking about what a post-apocalyptic city would be like: I was walking up a brightly-lit commercial street one night—I was probably about nineteen at the time—and just for a second, the lights blinked out. Every streetlight, every light in every store. They came back on so quickly that everyone on the street was asking one another, "Did you see that? Did that really just happen?", but the moment stayed with me. It only takes an instant of blackness to suggest the terror of a city with no electricity.
New York's gone dark twice in the years since I moved here—the 2003 blackout, and then those strange days after Hurricane Sandy when lower Manhattan had no electricity, during which time I somehow brilliantly managed to get stranded downtown after dark two evenings in a row—but I think that flicker in Toronto was the first time I started thinking about the fragility of the grid.
Your novel challenges the reader's perceptions of "old" and "new," by interweaving pre and post-apocalyptic story lines. Characters find tabloids in abandoned houses, a museum of the past inside an airport, and roam desolate landscapes with modern day artillery in hand, to name a few. What do you think the reader will gain through these juxtapositions?
I think there's an interesting tension in the juxtaposition of old and new, which probably accounts for the continued popularity of steampunk. In a way, the tabloids in abandoned houses are a physical reflection of the current digital age. Everything you say on the Internet is there forever. In Station Eleven, twenty years after the collapse of civilization it's still possible to read celebrity gossip.
An important destination for characters trekking through the post-apocalyptic world of Station Eleven is the Museum of Civilization, a place where travelers leave behind objects that remind them of the world that once was, a place that seems to span the gap between past, present, and future. Characters who lived before the downfall value the museum for its ability to serve as a memorial of the past for generations to come. Why do you think it is important to memorialize the past, and how do you think doing so will inform our future?
The past is context for the present, isn't it? I think having a sense of history is important, in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes. As a species, it seems to be important to us to hold on to the past: witness the wild popularity of sites like ancestry.com, where people sign up and pay membership fees and spend hours engaged in genealogical research to discover where they came from. In the context of this book, the Museum functions as a repository for artifacts of a lost world—after the lights go out, you've got to put your dead iPad somewhere—and a place where people can come together to remember and study the past. There's a sadness to it, because the objects collected there are from an age of expansion and technological innovation that's unlikely to come again, at least in these characters' lifetimes. And of course, for the survivors of a pandemic with a 99% mortality rate, the technology is the least of what they've lost, so it's also a place for collective mourning.
What do you most want readers to take away from Station Eleven?
I didn't write the book with a message in mind, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to see the book as a suggestion that perhaps we could all stand to be a little more mindful of the fragility of civilization, and perhaps slightly more appreciative of the technological marvels that surround us. Isn't it wonderful to have electricity? It's something I very much appreciate, personally.
Who have you discovered lately?
I'm reading a manuscript of a new novel by Peter Geye, whose most recent book was The Lighthouse Road. I've only met Peter a couple of times in person, but we have a fantastic working arrangement where we read and give notes on one another's drafts. His notes are always absolutely superb. I loved The Lighthouse Road, and his new novel is going to be even better.
I discovered a brilliant author a couple of months back. Her name's Elena Mauli Shapiro, and her second novel, In The Red, is coming out in October. It's an incredible story about crime, love, and morality, and it's one of the best books I've read in years. I want to read everything she writes.
