Station Eleven draws on all sorts of culture: science fiction the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes (especially its recurring character Spaceman Spiff) classical music William Butler Yeats the old-school, pre-email pleasures of letter-writing by hand the band R.E.M. How artists transform their lives into their art and create order out of chaos is Mandel’s main theme, and to explore it she doesn’t just reference graphic novels and Shakespeare. “It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.” Her novel, a science fiction tale about the captain of a space station, provides refuge from her life, which feels like being “marooned on a strange planet.” In the miniseries, Miranda says, “I am at my best when I am escaping,” whether it’s into her art, or from difficult relationships and oncoming pandemics. “It makes me happy,” she tells an obnoxious inquisitor. Miranda, for instance, before the Georgia flu hits, spends years toiling away at the graphic novel that gives the book and miniseries its title, writing the text and painting the artwork, with little expectation or even desire that it will ever be published. (It’s surely not a coincidence that the center of this web of characters is named Arthur, since many of the novel’s plot lines begin by people literally doing things for Art’s sake.) Almost every character in the novel is a creator of some kind: painter, illustrator, writer, photographer, curator, historian, musician, composer, actor, even religious charlatan. The same is true for many of the characters, who find solace, comfort, and community in their art. Playing the fairy queen Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kirsten ruminates on how this 400-year-old play, written in a pre-electronic era after two years of plague, is now being performed in a post-electronic era devastated by plague and filled with references to pestilence (“contagious frogs”) and how “rheumatic diseases do abound.” Shakespeare was “plague-haunted,” according to one character, living a lifetime “defined by” the pandemics that ravaged England, yet Kirsten “never feels more alive” than when she’s speaking his lines. Mandel draws explicit connections between Shakespeare’s plays, the plague-ridden times in which they were written, and the post-plague world in which the Traveling Symphony is performing them. Himesh Patel, Gregory Linington (center), and Gael García Bernal (prone) in Station Eleven. Jeevan, an aimless ex-photographer and would-be EMT, performs CPR on Arthur, unsuccessfully, but manages to save Kirsten, a child performer who plays a younger dumbshow version of Lear’s daughter in Arthur’s production and grows up to be a leading player in the Traveling Symphony, a roaming band of musicians and actors. We soon learn the doomed actor - Arthur Leander is his name - is connected to many of the story’s central protagonists, starting with an ex-wife named Miranda who is also (if her name isn’t connection enough to The Tempest) from an island the same one, in fact, where Arthur grew up in British Columbia. Written in 2014, the novel reads today as both eerily prescient and strangely hopeful, and not just because one of the novel’s guiding lights is William Shakespeare.īoth the novel and the miniseries begin with a scene from King Lear - another epic about societal collapse - in which the actor playing Lear dies from a heart attack during Act Four, just as the story’s deadly “Georgia flu” is beginning to devastate the planet. Twenty years later, a small group of survivors travel from settlement to settlement in the Great Lakes region performing concerto music and Shakespeare plays. Station Eleven depicts a catastrophic global pandemic that wipes out 99% of the earth’s population. John Mandel’s Station Eleven - had been adapted into a miniseries. During the covid-19 pandemic, two methods of escape for me have been Shakespeare and depictions of fictional catastrophes, so you can imagine my excitement when I learned that a novel that combines both - Emily St.
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