The story opens earlier, when Arthur Leander, the character
that binds them all together, suddenly dies of a heart attack one wintry night
on stage performing in King Lear.
Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo turned EMT jumps at the chance to save a life, a
famous celebrity’s life no less. Kirsten Raymonde, a child actress in the play,
watches in horror as the curtain drops and Arthur’s life drains from his body.
The night of this tragedy, the Georgia flu becomes a real threat to North
America. It was thought to be contained
in Russia and the surrounding countries, but evidence appears to the contrary.
Even though the epidemic becomes a pandemic, spreading everywhere imaginable, people
rush to their cars, clogging the highways, most eventually abandoning their
cars and setting out on foot as life deteriorates around them.
Now, 15 years later, Kirsten still belongs to the Traveling
Symphony, surviving in the name of art for humanity. Unfortunately, no one can
survive without committing some act of violence usually in self-defense. A small
knife is tattooed on the people who have killed someone, denoting how many kills
each person has committed since the pandemic broke out. Kirsten also has a line
from Star Trek tattooed on her arm,
the same quote written on the side of their caravan: “Survival is
insufficient”. In their travels they encounter a violent prophet, whose name is
as mysterious as his past. He is a master of brainwashing who has many followers.
Mandel weaves stories seamlessly from before and after the
pandemic all connected to Arthur. Station
Eleven teaches us never to take the world we live in for granted and to
stop sleepwalking through life. Imagine, “No more Internet. No more social
media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs
of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and
relationship-status updates…”. As you read, perhaps you will wonder if you,
too, would be able to survive in a barren world void of our technological
comforts.
