Life on Earth: Art as armour in Mandel’s ‘Station Eleven’

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”
– Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven 

In a world on the brink of a catastrophe, Miranda Caroll draws the story of Dr Eleven. 

Dr Eleven, a jaded physicist, lives on a space station the size of our moon after escaping from the ruins of a destroyed Earth. The planet’s artificial sky was damaged when they fled from an alien invasion, leaving its surface in perpetual twilight. Human communities live in the Undersea, a lonely network of submarines and fallout shelters under the space station’s oceans. The creator of this kaleidoscopic world, Miranda, is a shipping executive by day and comic artist by night. Miranda is one of many characters – the toughest, or perhaps the tenderest – to populate Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic epic, Station Eleven: a story of pandemic survivors trying to navigate the ruthless wilderness of a world without civilisation. 

Dr Eleven’s story is one of conflict and melancholy, of anger and longing. So is Mandel’s Station Eleven. As Mandel’s narrative spans across temporalities both before and after the catastrophe of a world-ending contagion, we observe the traumas inflicted upon a landscape when law and order crumble. We observe the cruelty of a fragmented world and its inhabitants’ attempts to survive and heal. Just as memory is power, art becomes a tool for survival. 

The world before the contagion is populated by Arthur Leander, Miranda Caroll, Clarke Thompson, and their contemporaries, who navigate lives of triumph and heartbreak with a lostness that is deeply human. By contrast, the post-pandemic generation confronts a lawless wasteland of violence. Kirsten Raymonde, our narrator, performs Shakespeare for the enduring human settlements with a troupe of musicians calling themselves the Travelling Symphony. In this lost land, each character seeks their own solace. Some turn towards religion and violence, conjuring fables in a distorted fantasy of new gods and prophets. Others, like Kirsten and her companions, inscribe through memories and artmaking. 

Electricity and gas become myths to the children of this new world. The aeroplane becomes a symbol of manmade freedom. The Symphony salvages food and clothing from abandoned houses. They build fires as the generators run out of propane. They whisper old words of poetry and pluck tunes on old strings, clinging to some semblance of familiarity in a land no longer recognisable. 

Mandel’s voice is elegiac. Sections of the novel become a chorus of mourning. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played under floodlights. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through aeroplane windows. No more flight. No more cities.” This polyphony of voices mourns the loss of human infrastructure with a haunting mixture of grief and tranquillity. 

Did Earth ever belong to us, or have we only borrowed it for too long? Mandel investigates questions and claims of ownership. The lives we meticulously build rest on a perilous network of manmade structures, ranging from social norms to resource access. But these structures of technology and the socioeconomic systems can collapse. Our time on Earth is fundamentally transient, vulnerable to entropic forces insentient to human existence. 

The only way to honour this impermanent earth is to make art about it. Miranda sketches visions of a fictional world that bleeds into a bruised sunset along the Malaysian coast, just as the Symphony scrapes together performances of Shakespeare and Beethoven in the ruins of a new land. Art anchors us to identity. It is our armour. A survival without identity, without imagination, is meaningless. 

Art is power. The thirst for beauty connects us when we are floundering, cast adrift.  In a stroke of metafiction, Mandel’s novel shares its name with the title of Miranda’s comic: Station Eleven. At the novel’s climax, Kirsten is captured by Tyler Leander, whose cultivation of a manic religion has earned him the name ‘prophet’ and a cult following. With a gun pointed at Kirsten’s forehead, Tyler quotes from the comic: “We long only to go home. We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.” Kirsten quotes it back at him and, in doing so, stalls her own death. In a world where their shared language is violence, these words open a bridge across the divide of blood and hatred. 

This shared devotion to a comic book tethers the two to their humanity. Kirsten survives because both she and Tyler are joined, however momentarily, by a power greater than themselves. 

“We have been lost for so long. We long only for the world we were born into.”

Does anything at all belong to us? This spectacle we call society can be uprooted in the blink of an eye. This claim over our Earth – our cities, our factories, our electric towers – is perilous. We are easily broken. Yet Station Eleven not only acknowledges but celebrates our fragility. The novel demonstrates how speculative fiction is a genre ultimately concerned with the relationship between the environment and the individual, between Earth and humanity. By the end of the novel, our wandering characters survive in a shaky diaspora, imagining a painstaking reemergence of human society as they cradle each other for warmth. There are no answers, but there is the hope of an endless search. 

We must do this, I think. We must make stories out of our own fragility. We must write novels about the world ending that manage, also, to be breathlessly hopeful. This is our power. To stare our demise right in the face, to imagine beyond the lives we know. 

We are owed nothing except our store of carbon. The Earth does not endow us with the right to claim anything but the people we are, at a moment in time: memories, thoughts, scars, and all. As Mandel’s characters wander a world beyond the edge, confronting the brute of physics, the harsh lashings of a landscape, they discover in themselves a ruthless optimism that mutates to survive. This is how we live on an Earth that is temporarily borrowed. This is how we survive. This is how we ache, and long, and lust for life.