'Survival is Insufficient': The Dystopian Worlds of Station Eleven & The Ship

[bookgazing]

Survival is insufficient.

“All I’m saying,” Dieter said, twelve hours out of St. Deborah by the Water, “is that quote on the lead caravan would be way more profound if we hadn’t lifted it from Star Trek.”

Kirsten Raymonde, the heroine of Emily St. John Mandel's novel Station Eleven, lives in a dystopian version of Toronto. Twenty years after a violent flu virus has ravaged the world, killing huge numbers and rendering society technologically poor, Kirsten works as a professional actress. She tours with a band of musicians and actors called The Travelling Symphony who perform Shakespearean plays and classical music as they pass through the small towns that constitute post-epidemic society. The motto of the symphony, 'Survival is insufficient', a Star Trek quote from the old world, informs their company's choice to keep going even if sometimes 'it seemed a difficult and dangerous way to survive and hardly worth it'. Their motto is so important to Kirsten that she has it tattooed on her arm.

The lives of the novel's main characters — actor Arthur Leander, his friend Clark, Arthur's ex-wife Miranda, Jeevan (the paramedic who tries to save Arthur) and Kirsten — are all informed by the idea that 'survival is insufficient'. Each of these characters finds their lives derailed at times, and fall into the trap of becoming 'high-functioning sleepwalkers'; strangers to themselves, or unsatisfied perfectionists who connect less and less authentically with the world around them. By destroying the world they are tied to, Mandel allows readers to see how, in times when we can all feel hollowed out by structures that push us down false paths, a satisfying life is easily lost and hard won. Her novel is not just about why art remains important when society is scrambling to rebuild and survive; it's about the importance and difficulty of being present, connected and alive. Station Eleven is keenly smart about how difficult it can be to define 'living'. And by setting much of her novel in a dystopia, Mandel shows readers how a catastrophe can illuminate the importance of everything.

That sounds a little cheesy and possibly kind of weird. Rest easy though - Station Eleven does not include rousing idealistic monologues about the need to 'keep the artistic flame burning'. Nor do any of its characters nobly take a bullet for art as a sunset bursts into glory behind them. The Symphony, and Mandel's entire novel, could have been founded on a nostalgic, naive and elitist vision of the dire importance of preserving classic art forms at all costs. Luckily, one of the best things about Station Eleven is its willingness to interrogate itself. Although the company likes to perform Shakespeare, and his plays are popular with the crowds, Kirsten's favourite line of text is from Star Trek. Kirsten carries two science fiction comics with her at all times and another member of their company absolutely loathes Shakespeare. There's nothing pushy about the love of art, theatre and Shakespeare that pervades Station Eleven. The reader is free to reject the particular kinds of culture the novel highlights and still fall for its overall themes about survival and humanity.

Sure, the novel allows moments of selective, rose-tinted nostalgia to creep in on the coat tails of this idea. Remembering the past, one character recalls an astounding world where 'When you're in danger, you call for the police'. 'Well, yes, but,' any reader who has been following recent news might say. However, generally, readers don't have to get nostalgic to appreciate its message that the past, and life in general, while not always good or fair, contains much to value. And crucially, it doesn't swing around to the other extreme and Station Eleven endorse the destruction of modern life so we can return to a (mythical) simpler, more authentic time. Ultimately Mandel's novel is about making the importance of making the best life you possibly can in the here and now. Her novel reinforces the importance of being present but, unlike so much current commentary about mindfulness, it acknowledges that sometimes the present is terrible and needs some mitigation.

I read Station Eleven last year, loved it, and then came back to reread it again last month just after I'd just finished The Ship by Antonia Honeywell. Although set in the aftermath of two wildly different dystopian collapses, the two books both rang similar bells. Like Station Eleven, The Ship is focused on that classic science fiction preoccupation — the importance of going beyond brute survival. And, The Ship is also preoccupied with investigating the value of the past.

For years, as he watched society crumble, Lalla's father, a former government advisor, has been developing a contingency plan — a fully stocked ship which can carry a select group of people to a fresh start in some remote location. No matter how bad circumstances get, Lalla's mother seems mysteriously reluctant to embark on this journey but Lalla's father, Michael, finally transports them all to the ship when his wife is violently injured. Without access to any other medical care, she has no choice but to go so she can be treated by a doctor. Why, yes, that did work out well for her husband didn't it.

At first, the community on board the ship seems to be radically anti-nostalgia. Michael, the leader of this new age Ark, advocates that everyone on board make a public testimony about their old life and then discard their past entirely. The world they've come from is harsh; a broken dystopia running out of resources. All the people on board have been hurt during the breakdown of society which makes the desire to start afresh seem immensely practical. Initially, it feels similar to Kirsten's decision to avoid remembering the first year she spent on the road in Station Eleven. Yet, as Lalla begins to learn more about the ship, she sees that really its policy of forgetting offers the community little chance to start anew.

In Station Eleven remembering and talking about the past is painful. It's a personal decision to tell stories or not to. Still, the past surrounds the characters; events are marked and significant relationships are formed even if they may end in heartbreak. In The Ship talking about the past is discouraged, if not exactly outlawed. Reminiscing reminds people that other people exist and they weren't saved by the ship. Relationships between parents and children are flattened until the children are communal offspring, with Michael as the overseeing patriarch. Even Lalla's own romantic relationship is orchestrated by her father to keep her placid (happily, it doesn't quite work). No one marks time because time is irrelevant. It's all about the journey, people. Worst of all, Lalla learns the ship is not heading anywhere. Michael is turning the ship every night, keeping it from reaching land because he believes there is nothing left worth finding. Now it really is all about the journey.

Still, is the ship really so terrible? The ship is geared for survival and freedom from pain. Lalla's mother, like many a mother dragged into a science fiction plot, does not survive her injuries. However, she is at least offered a painless end by the ship's doctor. Kirsten and the characters in Station Eleven are acutely aware of the sad, pointless endings available in a world without modern medicine. In their world, most of the doctors are dead and antibiotics are non-existent. Kirsten's brother died from infection when he stepped on a nail. When Lalla turns off her mother's pain relief, so the woman can see her daughter before she dies, I could almost hear Kirsten agreeing with the doctor that Lalla knows nothing of pain. So, when Lalla begins to question why everyone on board is so eager to turn their back on the positives of the past—fresh apples, new stories and social activism—the reader wonders if she represents a nostalgic viewpoint; a woman able to overlook pain for the chance of apples because she has never experienced either. It's easy to distrust Lalla at first, even though she's the narrator and her father seems sketchy, because she's self-absorbed and causes her mother so much pain.

However, as Lalla gradually discovers, the ship is geared for little beyond the survival of those on board. Well stocked with supplies, the ship cannot offer one fresh piece of fruit. Full of identical china, the ship offers no chance for individuality; a concept Michael feels can also bring pain since he saw Lalla upset by the loss of a particular plate. The arts, crafts and sports offered on board are ultimately meaningless; knitting is unwound and sculptures are melted down after a few days to keep supplies available. Lalla notes that although everyone on board is engaged in some task or other they are not making anything - not even a record of the passing days.

It's an unreal world, one antithetical to the lives of The Symphony from Station Eleven. Their work makes something real and beautiful that contrasts with the deprivation of their world. The willing way the people on the ship give up on creating would be unthinkable to the rest of the people who survive the flu in Station Eleven. They spend everyday making and creating solutions that allow them to live. Before she died, Lalla's mother commented that Michael's ship did not have 'enough sailcloth for one Van Gogh to paint on'; it's a closed in future that offers no outlet for true genius or expression. The people of the ship merely preserve. In contrast, the people who populate the future in Station Eleven recreate and invent as best they can with what they have to hand. The Ship is full of people living in the middle of luxurious nostalgia. In Station Eleven, the future is full of people adapting and trying to rebuild; people who even look to surpass what they've done and create new things.

On the ship, the price of survival is continued stasis; disconnection from development, individuality, innovation, guilt and responsibility in return for safety. Lalla vividly remembers the ship killing three people as it first set sail yet everyone else is determined not to remember. These are people who, before they joined the ship, did brave, necessary things like feeding children and releasing secret information. Lalla is horrified by the idea that they are locked in a constant holding pattern but it appears she alone feels this distress. The people on board are happy and, it turns out, aware of Michael's bizarre plan to turn the ship. They are content that they will never know pain or hunger again and they are willing to trade everything (and everyone else) for that safety. Lalla believes these people have been calculatedly chosen by Michael not because they were brave but because they lost everything—they have no hope of anything better and so they're prepared to settle for safety.

This may seem a reasonable choice for people who have seen and experienced the worst at the hands of a broken world. Still, I found myself thinking of Kirsten whenever the characters in The Ship justified their acceptance of the safe unchanging world. When Lalla pointed out that they'd abandoned so many in order to make their own getaway, I thought of Kirsten so troubled by the third dagger tattoo she adds to her arm after killing a man on the road. When it becomes clear that the people of the ship are content to leave their children with the problems of the future, I thought of Kirsten striking out for the lights she sees in the city. Safety and stasis is not a choice that Kirsten is offered by the world of Station Eleven. Even if it were I can't see the travelling actress who at the end of the novel is 'beside herself with with impatience to see the far southern town with the electrical grid' making that kind of choice. When The Ship begins it seems like a collective support network but the society on board the ship in fact turns out to be an individualist survivalist's paradise—cut off from any sense of responsibility or any drive to innovate. It's a world that argues that survival is sufficient, and that those who survive are somehow special or worthy. It is a world similar to the one that Tyler, the violent cult leader in Station Eleven, believes in.

What makes Kirsten my favourite character from Station Eleven is that the novel allows her to honestly explore how to make the best life out of incredibly difficult circumstances. Kirsten faces different obstacles to characters like Miranda; a woman who sees more of life before the flu hits. And, as a consequence, her attempt to make a life is shaped by different questions. How do you make a good life when you've killed several times to survive? What is truly important when the world collapses? Why be an actress in a dystopian society? She is both freer and just as constrained as Miranda.

Kirsten is able to make choices Miranda could not but is also deprived of resources that made Miranda's life easier. She is required to make hard choices that Miranda is spared but is easier in her own skin than Miranda is after she marries Arthur. It may seem strange to wish a character a life in the a decimated world but I was sorry that Miranda didn't make it to the dystopian future. Kirsten walks with a skewed, almost reversed, set of the burdens and benefits Miranda carries. It would have been fascinating to see how Miranda, who had created a shield to help herself get through our modern world, adapted to times and places that required different types of armour.

The society of The Ship inevitably damns itself. Michael reveals himself as a cult leader nearly willing to shoot his own daughter if she upsets the balance of what he's created. At the end of The Ship, Lalla sails off into the unknown - alone in a small lifeboat with limited supplies - to start again, and see what's out there on the land she knows is nearby. It's a brave decision for Lalla to leave when everyone else trades stasis for safety. Again, it's the kind of decision Kirsten would never have to make on her own, surrounded as she is by a supportive community. Which brings me to the main difference between The Ship and Station Eleven.

The world of The Ship is timely, and the drawing of its concept is fascinating, but it offers a familiar dystopia - a world full of individualistic survivors sure to do whatever it takes to ensure they make it to the end. Science fiction is keen to show us the darker side of humanity, while also citing the heroism of the exceptional individual. It's a shaming kind of fiction that calls readers to wake up, separate from a herd and measure up to the standards of the lone hero. Science fiction calls that realism. It's interesting to see Station Eleven take a much more optimistic and gentler approach to a similar message; to essentially say that we can walk through this world, awake, together. We don't need to perform big acts of heroism in order to be wake up. And we don't need to set ourselves apart. We can work to move beyond survival together. In fact, perhaps it's better if we do this together rather than apart because when we trying to get through life alone we tend to end up as the 'high-functioning sleepwalker' Clark suddenly discovers himself to be.

Reading Station Eleven so soon after The Ship, it felt like Station Eleven could have been written as a critique of Michael's ideas. So vastly does its futuristic society eventually disagree with his policies, it could be a meta-book written by Lalla. Sadly, I like the idea of Lalla writing this book, and it being passed on just as Miranda's fascinating comics about Station Eleven and the Undersea unstoppably reach out to new readers, better than one of the methods of creation The Ship loads onto Lalla. Though Lalla's attempt to create a museum is cool and her insistence on marking time on the ship is revolutionary, Honeywell's novel eventually sleepwalks her into becoming a new Eve. I've got a feeling this was meant to make the ending extra poignant but it just made me cringe. Reproductive science fiction is interesting to analyse but not so much fun to read.

Both Station Eleven and The Ship were smart works but it's obvious I liked Station Eleven the best. Dystopian flu-ridden worlds are so common now; virus dystopias are the new vampire novel and they aren't even that new. So, it's important that books based around this concept not only have strong plots but also enough artistry to distinguish their worlds. Each new world need to be particular in some way, probably multiple ways, in order for readers to care and to invest.

Having read Station Eleven twice in six months I can say this novel carries plenty of particulars I care about: the descriptions of the comics; Clark and Arthur's repeated memory of dancing in a club; the scene where Kirsten and Sayid play Titania and Oberon despite having just broken up; the description of Miranda's last moments. It's a confident piece of work that makes strong use of structure, voice and selection of detail. All this and more made Station Eleven stand out in a world full of dystopia. And of course, it was just so thought provoking to see a dystopian world that doesn't just bring misery or alternatively (and squickier) just freedom from modern concerns (yargh).

The way Mandell realises The Symphony, and builds up her novel's overall examination of the need for a life that goes beyond pure survival, produces an elegant, multi-layered novel. Station Eleven reminds readers that sometimes in the midst of life it's easy to lose what is most valuable. It's a book to keep by your bed and dip into if you're ever lured in by a glossy magazine's offer of easy empowerment, and find yourself repeating 'I regret nothing' into a mirror in a clinical hotel room.

Supplemental Material

Renay reviews Station Eleven
Ana talks about Station Eleven and seeing Emily St. John Mandel
Thea James reviews Station Eleven at Kirkus
Maree reviews Station Eleven
Memory listened to the Station Eleven audiobook and loved it

(In conclusion, everyone loves Station Eleven but no one I know has read The Ship)