Station Eleven

Station Eleven wasn't what I was expecting, which isn't necessarily a bad thing unless your head is geared for space battles and intergalactic travel and you don't get it.

It's beautifully written and the author has a subtlety of prose that's both rewarding and enjoyable, but that's not always enough. I felt cheated because of the weak dystopia and sci-fi tags.

Besides the lack of action, the book jumps between characters and time periods in an attempt to come together at the end, which succeeds to a point, but suffers from lack of bite and emotional investment.

Station Eleven heavily focuses on the play King Lear by William Shakespeare and its strong narrative, but I don't understand how they connect or why? It could just as well be Macbeth or Othello.

The book constantly attempts to connect between the past - before the pandemic, the present - as the pandemic hits, and the future - twenty years later, but why specifically King Lear?

I'm a huge fan of bleak dystopia and I revel in imaginary scenarios where everyone dies or hangs on after being ravaged by the super flu, zombies, vampire hoards, etc., and although there are some good chapters about survival, there's not enough of it, constantly jumping back to the past or advancing forward, but very rarely relating what it would be like to survive through such a pandemic, which is what I wanted the most.

I want a Day of the Triffids experience, a War of the Worlds experience, but the author chose sentimentality above all else.

The book feels strangely privileged and stiff, and a country mile from surviving by your fingertips.

I also made the mistake of reading this immediately after The Stand by Stephen King. You can add as much Shakespeare and pretty prose as you like, but seems a million miles away from incredible characters and heart-pounding action. I cared for people in The Stand, even some of the baddies, but didn't feel much for the people in Station Eleven.

To give Station Eleven credit, I initially rated it 4 stars and jotted down comparisons with the Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, to emphasize its subtlety, but baulked at how incorrectly marketed it is as sci-fi, with confusing references to Star Trek and "Survival Is Insufficient".

I haven't given up on Emily St. John Mandel yet and will be reading Sea of Tranquility soon, but unfortunately, Station Eleven is all over the place and a strangely unfulfilling and empty read.