Emily St.

John Mandel (1979)

 1979 Emily St. John Mandel was born in Comox, Canada, but she was raised off the
1975 west coast of British Columbia on the tiny Denman Island, which she used as the
basis for Delano Island in Station Eleven
1979

She was homeschooled until the age of fifteen

Left school at 18 to study contemporary dance at The School of Toronto Dance

Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal

Lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the playwright and producer Kevin Mandel,
and works part-time as an administrative assistant in the cancer research lab at
Rockefeller University

Achieves success with fourth novel, Station Eleven

2014

2020
Novels

photographed in 1903 by alice boughton

∠ Last Night in Montreal (2009)
∠ The Singer’s Gun (2010)
∠ The Lola Quartet (2012)
∠ Station Eleven (2014)
 Last Night in Montreal (2009)
focuses on the mysterious past
of a woman named Lilia, who was
abducted by her father
 The Singer’s Gun (2010), a
globe-spanning crime novel
 The Lola Quartet (2012), a
character study that considers
the slow degradation of hopes,
dreams, and expectations of
people who are only in their late
20s but already feel ancient
 Station Eleven (2014), a
post-apocalyptic novel set in the
near future in a world ravaged
by the effects of a virus
(“Georgia Flu”)
fake comic cover of station eleven (2014)
nathan burton design
nathan burton design
nathan burton design
nathan burton design
nathan burton design
nathan burton design
toronto after the georgia flu
Post-apocalyptic genre

Mandel’s first three novels were classified as Crime Novels or

Thrillers, and so she wrote Station Eleven in part to escape from
being pigeonholed into one generic category. This book is often
considered Science Fiction, and it even won a sci-fi award, but,
as it does not contain any new technologies, Mandel believes it
is simply literary fiction. In a way, the novel defies genre, as most
post-apocalyptic or dystopian novels deal with the chaos that
immediately follows the cataclysm; Station Eleven is mostly set
before or fifteen to twenty years after the Georgia Flu outbreak.
Station Eleven is not so much about apocalypse as about
memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning; the effort of art to
deepen our fleeting impressions of the world and bolster our
solitude.
Survival is insufficient

”
Titania speaks as if to herself now, Oberon for-
gotten. Her voice carries high and clear over the
silent audience, over the string section waiting for
their cue on stage left. “And through this distem-
perature, we see the seasons alter.”
All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are
labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY let-
tered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan
carries an additional line of text: Because survival

”
is insufficient.
An ode to the Travelling Symphony in the style
of a Shakespearean sonnet

We travel through a world that’s lost so much

But find that there’s still time enough for dreaming
Beneath the stars, we glitter at their touch
Performing in our masquerade of seeming.

The simplest costumes, instruments and tools

Help bring alive a story long forgotten
Of kings and lovers, warriors and fools
Astute and brave, or woebegone and rotten.

And though the way before us may be long

We hope to bring some meaning to this madness
And though the stage and setting’s often wrong

We conjure up an antidote to sadness

For though our tribulations may be tough
We know that mere survival’s not enough.
Kirsten’s loss

” KR: . . . Look, I was eight. Nine, when we stopped walking.

I can’t remember the year we spent on the road, and
I think that means I can’t remember the worst of it.
But my point is, doesn’t it seem to you that the people
who have the hardest time in this — this current era,
whatever you want to call it, the world after the Geor-
gia flu — doesn’t it seem like the people who struggle
the most with it are the people who remember the old
world clearly?
FD: I hadn’t thought about it.
KR: What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the

”
more you’ve lost.

— Kirsten Raymonde: interview to François Diallo

No more. . . (1)

”
An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from
below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No
more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No
more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling
power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films,
except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the di-
alogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for
the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after
two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult
to come by. No more screens shining in the half-light as people
raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert
states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens,
no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.
No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a
scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping veg-
etables for dinner, a dog bite.
No more. . . (2)

”
No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through
airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking
down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up
by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more
requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position
— but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and
there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They
collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were
ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were
filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers
snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.

”
No more countries, all borders unmanned.
No more. . . (3)

”
No more fire departments, no more police. No more road main-
tenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from
Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vanden-
burg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmo-
sphere into space.
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 with heart icons whole or broken,
plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of
babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more
reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing,

”
feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.
Main characters (1)

∠ Arthur Leander, a wildly successful film actor originally from the fictional
Delano Island in British Columbia. Despite his success Arthur is shiftless
and unhappy and marries three times. He dies onstage of a heart attack
portraying King Lear in a Toronto theatre at age 51 the night the pandemic
takes hold of North America.
∠ Miranda Carroll, Arthur’s first wife who is eleven years younger than him.
She is both an artist who is obsessed with creating her graphic novel,
Station Eleven, about Dr. Eleven, a man who lives on a space station
shaped like a planet that evacuated when aliens descended, and a
proficient business woman. Shortly before Arthur’s death, Miranda gives
him copies of her finally completed graphic novel which Arthur later gives
to Kirsten and his son, Tyler. Mandel has said this is the character of her
creation she most identifies with.
Main characters (2)

∠ Elizabeth is Arthur’s second wife and Tyler’s mother. She is a borderline

alcoholic movie star, and believes that everything happens for a reason.
∠ Tyler Leander, the son of Arthur and his second wife Elizabeth. He grows
up in Jerusalem and is stranded in an airport in the fictional city of
Severn for two years after the epidemic. He and his mother eventually
leave with a religious cult and he grows up to be the religious leader
known as the Prophet.
∠ Clark Thompson, Arthur’s British best friend whom he met while they
were struggling actors who later works as a corporate businessman and
then after the collapse of civilization reinvents himself as a curator of the
Museum of Civilization dedicated to obsolete objects.
∠ Jeevan Chaudhary, a former paparazzo, turned entertainment journalist,
turned paramedic whose life keeps intersecting with Leander’s at key
moments. He even tried to save Arthur when he was dying.
∠ Frank Chaudhary, Jeevan’s veteran disabled brother, a ghostwriter who
lives a life of solitude in his apartment.
Main characters (3)

∠ Kirsten Raymonde, a young child actor from Toronto who is eight when
the Georgian flu destroys her world. Initially she and her brother are the
only survivors in her family but as they travel he dies too. She joins the
theatre troupe as a teenager and becomes obsessed with actor Arthur
Leander, whose death she witnessed as a child. She carries with her the
Dr. Eleven comic books Arthur gave her as a child.
∠ August is one of Kirsten’s closet friends in the Traveling Symphony. He is
the second violin and has only recently begun acting with the Symphony.
He also writes poetry in secret.
∠ Charlie (Charlotte Harrison) is the second cello of the Traveling Symphony
and is a close friend of Kirsten’s and August’s. The three used to break
into houses together, but Charlie and her husband. . .
Literary references

∠ Mandel borrows from Shakespeare’s tragedy, King Lear, and she also
stages two production of the play within her novel, one before and one
after the collapse
∠ There are also references to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
∠ “Survival Instinct” is episode 122 (the second episode of the sixth season,
Sept. 1999) of the science fiction TV series Star Trek: Voyager. In this
episode, Seven of Nine encounters three Borg with whom she was
previously linked. This episode contains the line “Survival is insufficient”
(uttered first by Seven of Nine, then by the Doctor).
∠ Another influence was Cormick McCarthy’s The Road
emily st. john mandel
emily st. john mandel
emily st. john mandel