2. Station Eleven

 By Emily St. John Mandel  

I should have read Station Eleven years ago.   

Olman had actually bought it new back in 2014.  His review was intriguing enough and the PA premise made me ask him if I could keep his copy to read later.  Maybe the lukewarm review didn’t make me want to read Station Eleven right away.  I’m too wary of narratives that rely on the < Six Degrees of Separation cliche -- it’s been way overdone since the 1993 film came out.

Whatever my reasons for putting off Station Eleven, by the time Covid-19 turned 2020 into the year of the pandemic, I'd forgotten I even had this book.  I had even bought the uncut edition of The Stand and still didn’t make the connection that I also had another PA pandemic novel in my possession.  Station Eleven would’ve made a good follow up too.  Where The Stand was over-bloated and dated, Station Eleven was compact, cohesive and contemporary -- with diverse non-white characters to boot!

What finally jogged my memory that I had a copy of Station Eleven was an FB friend who recommended the new TV series, and a couple of her friends commented about how they had loved the book!  I was like, wait a goddamn minute… don’t I have this somewhere…?  Sure enough, it was right there in plain sight, nestled in my on-deck shelf!  Well, better late than never.

And you know what -- I quite liked it.  Station Eleven had almost everything The Stand had, but with better writing. Sorry Stephen, you had a great idea, but The Stand needed some serious editing!   The Georgian Flu, like Captain Tripps, wiped out the human population, but pockets of survivors thrive here and there and end up forming communities.  Where The Stand was mostly linear, Station Eleven was non-linear.   Where The Stand had supernatural elements, Station Eleven was plausible and low-key, but still had some exciting action at the end.  

It also posed some basic philosophical questions that was lacking in The Stand, like what if you have kids who grew up after civilization ended and never knew the old world, which had dentists, Disney and the internet?   “Does it still make sense to teach kids about the way things were?... Does knowing these things make them more or less happy?”

Where The Stand took its sweet-ass time establishing the fallout of Captain Tripps vis-à-vis multiple characters, Station Eleven – when it wanted to – effectively established situations in a couple of paragraphs, which allowed the narrative to move on to character exploration or wanky Arthur Leander segments.  Why would I need to explain The Traveling Symphony when I can paraphrase Mandel?

There was the flu that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth and the shock of the collapse that followed, the first unspeakable years when everyone was traveling, before everyone caught on that there was no place they could walk to where life continued as it had before and settled wherever they could, clustered close together for safety in truck stops and former restaurants and old motels. The Traveling Symphony moved between the settlements of the changed world and had been doing so since five years after the collapse, when the conductor had gathered a few of her friends from their military orchestra, left the air bae where they’d been livingin, and set out into the unknown landscape…

     Twenty years after the collapse they were still in motion, travelling back and forth along the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan, west as far as Traverse City, east and north over the 49^th parallel to Kincardine… They encountered other travellers only rarely, peddlers mostly, carting miscellanea between towns. The Symphony performed music—classical, jazz, orchestral arrangements of pre-collapse pop songs—and Shakespeare. They’d performed more modern plays sometimes in the first few years, but what was startling, what no one would have anticipated, was that audiences seemed to prefer Shakespeare to their other theatrical offerings.

    “People want what was best about the world,” Dieter said. He himself found it difficult to live in the present. He’d played in a punk band in college and longed for the sound of an electric guitar.

Once you read enough PA fiction, you realize after civilization ends, a figure arises to take advantage of those who are lost, fearful and/or desperate. Whether it’s The Dark Man aka Randall Flagg in The Stand, or The Prophet, the son of Hollywood actors who grows up to become a dangerous cult leader in Station Eleven, you just know these evil despots have to be taken down like pronto.

            “Tell us about the prophet,” the conductor said.

He’d come to St.Deborah by the Water not long after the Symphony had left Chrlie and Jeremy there, the head of a sect of religious wanderers. The sect had moved into the Walmart at first, a communal encampment in what had once been the Lawn and Garden Department. They told the townspeople they’d come in peace. A few people were uneasy about them, this new population with vague stories about travel in the south… but the new arrivals were friendly and self-sufficient. They shared their meat when they hunted. They helped with chores and seemed harmless. There were nineteen of them, and they mostly kept to themselves; some time passed before the townspeople realized that the tall man with blond hair who seemed to be their leader was known only as the prophet and had three wives. “I am a messenger,” he said, when introduced to people. No one knew his real name…

                When the winter fever struck St.Deborah by the Water, when the mayor died, the prophet added the mayor’s wife to his collection and moved with his followers into the gas station in the centre of town. No one had quite realized how much weaponry they had. Their stories about travel in the south began to fall into place. Within a week it became obvious that the town was his. Eleanor didn’t why the prophet’s dog was named Luli.

The Cons:  the interconnectedness theme was too pat.  Must that one person -- whom all the seemingly disparate characters had a shared commonality with -- be an insufferable, narcissistic Hollywood actor?  Arthur Leander was an annoyingly convenient plot device.  He’s like Larry Underwood from The Stand, except Larry survived and grew as a character while Arthur died at the beginning of the story, as a narcissistic bore, just before the pandemic even began. 

Arthur’s main contribution to the plot was two-fold.  First, when the pandemic hit, Arthuer’s movie star wife, Elizabeth, and their young son Tyler were marooned in an airport with Arthur’s friend Clark.  Elizabeth was always somewhat removed from reality and believed the world ended for a reason.  Months later, she and Tyler joined a band of religious wanderers while Clark helped establish a community at the old airport.   Years later, Tyler became the big bad Prophet.  Second, Arthur’s previous wife, Miranda, a quiet Canadian in over her head when she married the older Arthur, would escape into the world of the comic she was obsessively working on, which was called Station Eleven.  The hero was Dr. Eleven, a brilliant physicist who took his name from the space station where he lived.

Miranda never published her comic.  And after their divorce, Arthur had a copy of Station Eleven: he gave one chapter to his son Tyler and another to Kristen, a child actor in the Toronto production of King Lear who witnessed Arthur dying of a heart attack on stage.  Both Tyler and Kristen kept their respective dog-eared Station Eleven copies with them, even after the world ended.  

So for someone who died early on, and merely served as a character connector, an awful lot of space got devoted to Arthur Leander.  He was a cliched composite:  a white, male Canadian actor from a fictional Gulf Island who studied acting in Toronto, then made it big in Hollywood.   There was even an entire chapter comprised of mundane letters to a friend still living on Delano Island.  When I realized the letters had no relevance to the overall plot, I skipped it and saved myself precious time.  Thank god the TV series casts Gael Garcia Bernal instead of someone more generic, like a fake-aged Ryan Gosling.

But the rest of the book was quite engaging and good.  Other than the yawn-inducing letters, there was the odd interview with the grown up Kristen Raymonde conducted by someone trying to revive a local newspaper.  After civilization ended, Kristen survived and ended up joining The Travelling Sympony as a performer.  Unlike Arthur’s letters, the interviews actually provided context and enhanced the overall narrative.

DIALLO: The other towns you pass through, are they very different from here?

RAYMONDE:  The places we return to more than once aren’t dissimilar here. Some places, you pass through once and never return, because you can tell something’s very wrong. Everyone’s afraid, or it seems like some people have enough to eat and other people are starving, or you see pregnant elevant-year-olds and you know the place is either lawless or in the grip of something, a cult of some kind. There are towns that are perfectly reasonable, logical systems of governance and such, and they you pass through two years later and they’ve slid into disarray. All towns have their own tradiitons. There are towns like this one, where you’re interested in the past, you’ve got a library—

On February 2, while WFH. I half listened to a CBC Radio interview with author Emily Mandel.  I learned she grew up on Denman Island, which she described as “gorgeous yet claustrophobic.” In Station Eleven, she fictionalized it as Delano Island, which was where Arthur was from.  I don’t remember much else except Mandel sounded like a warm, likeable person. 

Mostly, I liked how Mandel described the end of the world through her characters, particularly Clark, who happened to be stuck at Severn City airport when the pandemic hit.  Again, Severn was fictionalized to be Any City, Michigan.  This was another minor quibble, as I felt there was no need to fictionalize ‘lesser’ locations, while others, ie. Toronto and Los Angeles, weren’t.  In any case, Clark ended up never leaving the airport since the word ended, and became one of the key founders of the community that established itself there.

Pre-pandemic Clark:

          The story of the pandemic’s arrival in North America had broken while he was in the air. This was another thing that was hard to explain years later, but up until that morning the Georgia Flu had seemed quite distant, especially if one happened not to be on social media. Clark had never followed the news very closely and had actually heard about the flu only the day before the flight, in a brief newspaper story about a mysterious outbreak of some virus in Paris, and it hadn’t been at all clear that is was developing into a pandemic. But now he watched the too-late evacuation of cities, the riots outside hospitals on three continents, the slow-moving exodus clogging every road, and wished he’d been paying more attention. The gridlocked roads were puzzling, because where were all these people going? If these reports were to be belieed, no only ha the Georgia Flu arrived, but it was already everywhere…

            …He turned away from the monitor, unable to bear another second of the news.  For how long had he been standing here? His tea had gone cold. He drifted down the concourse and stood before the flight-status monitors. Every flight had been cancelled.

            How had all of this happened so quickly? Why hand’t he checked the news before he left the airport? It occurred to Clark that he should call someone, actually everyone, that he should call everyone he’d ever loved and talk to them and tell them all the things that mattered, but it was apparently already too late for this, his phone displaying a message he’d never seen before: SYSTEM OVERLOAD EMERGENCY CALLS ONLY. He bought another tea, because the first one had gone cold, and also he was beset now by terrible fears and walking to the kiosk seemed like purposeful action.

Post-pandemic Clark:

        The night sky was brighter than it had been. On the clearest nights the stars were a cloud of light across the breadth of the sky, extravagant in their multitudes. When Clark noticed this, he wondered if he was possibly hallucinating…

       “It’s not your imagination,” Dolores said. He’d begun to think of her as his closest friend. They’d spent a pleasantly companionable day indoors, cleaning, and now they were helping build a bonfire with branches someone had dragged in from the woods. She explained it to him. One of the greatest scientific questions of Galileo’s time was whether the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. Impossible to imagine this ever having been in question in the age of electricity, but the night sky was a wash of light in Galileo’s age, and it was a wash of light now. The era of light pollution had come to an end. The increasing brilliance meant the grid was failing, darkness pooling over the earth. I was here for the end of electricity. The thought sent shivers up Clark’s spine. “The lights will come back on someday,” Elizabeth kept insisting, “and then we’ll all finally get to go home.” But was there actually any reason to believe this?

 

1. The Duke and I (aka Bridgerton)

By Julia Quinn

Since my final book for 2021 was the ultra-masculine Razorblade Tears, I might as well kick off 2022 with ultra-feminine The Duke and I (better known as Bridgerton). 

Truth be known, I had already watched the popular Netflix series not long after it debuted in December 2020.  Yet I couldn’t bring myself to post the actual Bridgerton cover featuring the two main stars of the show.  That version was lent to me by a friend who enjoys mainstream fiction because I told her I had watched Bridgerton.  So let this be known that I did not voluntarily seek out a Julia Quinn novel!

If Razorblade Tears was the equivalent of having a bloody rare steak at a roadside diner, The Duke & I was like eating cotton candy at the fair - delightful at first, but you soon tire of its cloying sweetness and end up throwing the rest away.  I’m perfectly fine with reading a romance that's insubstantial as spun sugar, but what galled me was that Jill Barnett blurb on the cover hailing Julia Quinn as “truly our contemporary Jane Austen”.  Jesus bloody Christ on a cross.  If Quinn is truly today’s Jane Austen, the future of fiction is in serious trouble indeed.

But that’s not all.  Towards the end of The Duke and I, Quinn had the nerve to regurgitate the famous Austen quote:  "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Ugh, the hubris!  Not only did Quinn not write nearly as well as Austen, she lacked any keen observation into the fictional world she had created, if you could even call it a creation. That’s what made Austen so appealing to generations of readers, both male and female – it wasn’t just the charming romance or courtship that was enjoyable, but Austen’s ability to find humour in the ritual of finding a suitable marriage partner and the reality of a woman’s place in Napoleonic England. 

Even in Pride and Prejudice, the interactions between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy were quite limited, as much of the novel was devoted to exploring the society they inhabited and the people they interacted with. 

So I was quite disappointed to see the relationship between Simon and Daphne as not only the main plot line, but the only plot line in the entire book.  Since I had watched the Bridgerton series before reading the book, imagine my complete surprise when I made the realization that the Netflix series actually added additional side characters and subplots that were not found in the source material!  So we shouldn’t be comparing The Duke and I to an Austen novel, but to The King and I, the musical.  The writing contained very little exposition - it was pretty much all dialogue.  Quite stagey and hammy dialogue too, like an American attempting to sound like a witty aristocratic English person, but coming off as something straight out of a Harlequin romance.  Wait a minute... this was exactly like a Harlequin romance!   

Usually, a film or TV adaptation had to simplify or streamline key elements of the source novel, but in the case of The Duke and I, the roles were reversed.  Quinn’s narrative was so shallow and the characters so two-dimensional, the Bridgerton writers took liberties by creating a color blind society and adding more supporting characters with their respective arcs and subplots.   Who can blame them?  In Quinn’s novel, there was no attempt to describe the socio-economic aspects of the ton.  Quinn is an American who graduated from Harvard, so it wouldn’t have been very hard for her to create a world that was a little more than bland 18th century pseudo-British society.  I think that was one reason why the Bridgerton writers wanted to create a diverse cast, to help make the world of Bridgerton more appealing and universal, because they realized there wasn’t much that would distinguish it from the more quality stuff coming out of the BBC.

At the end of the book, Quinn writes about growing up on a steady diet of the Sweet Dreams series, which was the teen division of Harlequin. Quinn herself admitted that her dream was to write adult romances in the vein of Harlequin romances, so her work should be appraised in that context.  The Duke and I was pure escapism and a guilty pleasure, and should be enjoyed as such (if you can get over the awfully corny parts) – just don’t make any aspirations to being anything close to a Jane Austen novel!

As a romance, it was decent enough, if very vanilla.  Unsurprisingly, much time was spent making Simon the Duke dark, brooding, well-educated, well-travelled and sophisticated.  He was handsome and arrogant and like Mr Darcy, his arrogance masked a secret, yada yada.  Daphne on the other hand, was the typical heroine.  Functioning as a mere cipher for the reader, she was thus totally BORING.  Even though she had four brothers, she could pack a punch and ride a horse well, she had no interest in math or science.  As a young woman of her time, Daphne was very naïve and simple.  All she wanted in life was to be happily married with many children.  At some point, when she had married the Duke, she committed a morally questionable act on her half-drunk husband.  Great!  Finally, some real conflict!  The heroine should be allowed to make grievous mistakes, yet the disappointing thing was she never really owned up to her actions and nothing was ever seriously at stake.   It was thus all about having earth-shattering marital sex with a hot Duke domesticating the Duke and having him come around to the idea of having lots of kids.

Olman asked me how The Duke and I compared to a Georgette Heyer book.  Based on what I know of Heyer from Olman’s reviews, her books are much more substantial.  So Olman thinks I’d really like Heyer.  After all, he has likened her books to a “delicious box of chocolates”.  

I think I will have to give Georgette Heyer a try.  Or better yet, read more Jane Austen.  I have only read two.  And I have at least two more on my on-deck shelf that I have yet to read.