All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.
The book opens with the death of an actor on stage: heart attack, completely unrelated to the epidemic of flu which wipes out most of the world’s population, and yet somehow linked with the lives of many of the survivors.
Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic book Station Eleven: A Novel has no Mad Max-style warring armies, no mutants or zombies, no underground laboratories of scientists working on new technology to save civilization. The story wanders back and forth from the beginnings of the actor’s career through to twenty years after the epidemic. All of the characters are achingly normal, trying to find fulfillment in their mundane lives pre-collapse, or moments of happiness as they try to survive afterward. Sounds like a fairly sedate, character-study, doesn’t it? Well let me tell you, I finished this one in less than two days. Not kidding here, day-and-a-half tops. Like eating dessert in one bite, owmf, done. The book is beautiful, and scary, and exciting in places, and full of that kind of sadness you only get when you think about lovely things that you’ll never see again.
Here’s an interesting end-of-civilization fact I hadn’t known before: gasoline loses its potency over time. Three years, and no more gas, no more cars and motorcycles, no more generators. That already takes care of a lot of the imagery you’d expect in a post-apocalypse world. And while there will always be people who take things by force, in Station Eleven there just aren’t enough people left on the whole planet to sustain riots or armies.
What you end up with is a few days of mass chaos, followed by the slow winding-down of the world.
Mandel starts Chapter Six with a list of just some of the things that go away forever after the the flu epidemic. It’s chilling; there are the big things like electricity and cars and planes. Then there are things we don’t think of until they’re gone, like insulin and chemotherapy medication and antibiotics to keep the scratch on your finger from going septic. And of course there’s everything that most of us can’t even imagine not being there, like smartphones. Or the internet. Try reading that chapter without imagining what it would be like not getting that next issue of a comic book or the next episode of your favorite TV show. Ever. I think the part that terrified me the most was being so thoroughly cut off from anyone more than a few miles away that you can’t even confirm if they’re still alive. That sort of thing makes me want to start an apocalypse plan with my friends and relatives. “Okay, so if civilization collapses, am I coming to you or are you coming to me? I don’t want to travel thousands of miles and find out you went the opposite direction by a different route.”
All of this of course makes many of the survivors incredibly nostalgic for the time that is now gone. Mandel has a very apt way of putting it when someone (not yet realizing just how bad things have gotten) realizes that this may be the last point of their life before everything changes: “…wistful in advance for the present moment.” Everyone who was alive before the epidemic tries to remember, ten or fifteen years on, what air conditioning was like. What it felt like to see a plane flying. What their last phone conversation was. People scavenging in deserted houses collect TV Guides and magazine clippings, or hang on to odd possessions that tie them to their old life. It’s some of these items that the story uses to link people with other times, to show all of the odd connections that were made between all the characters that come across as real, and quirky, and so believably fallible with all their bad decisions and perfectly normal lives. And I can’t really even go into detail about any of these connections because there were so many sections where you’d get that neat, “Oh hey, I remember that!” moment, and I don’t want to ruin that for anyone.
But what made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn’t matter who’d used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, although someone – probably Sayid – had written “Sartre: Hell is other people” in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out “other people” and substituted “flutes.”
Probably my favorite storyline was the one featuring The Traveling Symphony. The nomadic group of musicians and actors covers a lot of ground as they move between settlements, so they’re the ones that move the action of the story, and they’re the ones who end up as the link between most of the other storylines. The Symphony is also such a wonderful concept in and of itself, mostly because they’re working to bring art and music and something other than just survival to people. But in between the orchestral performances and Shakespeare (it’s Shakespeare that their audiences want, instead of more modern plays) there’s also caravans made from gutted pickup trucks pulled by horses, rehearsing lines while keeping crossbows trained on the forest beside the road, arguments between people with artistic sensibilities and fifteen years of traveling together, and orchestra members who drop their original first names and become known as their instruments: viola, clarinet, seventh guitar. There’s a lot in Station Eleven that shows the worst of humanity combined with life in the post-epidemic world, but the Traveling Symphony is definitely an example of people making new lives for themselves while holding onto what was best about the world before everything changed.