So every now and then
I read a book that is so utterly brilliant I want to stand on tall buildings
and shout loudly at people that they should read it. This is one of this times.
Emily St. John Mandel’s
dystopian novel, Station Eleven, was published
last year to great success and acclaim. The book opens during a production King
Lear. Hollywood actor Arthur Leander dies on stage, while a child actress
watches from the wings. That night, a deadly virus spreads through North
America and the rest of the world, and the majority of the human population is
wiped out within weeks. Technology and governments subside, communities break
down, civilisation collapses. The book then oscillates between the worlds
before and after civilisation, between the lives of Arthur Leander and the
people he knew, and the aftermath of the epidemic. Two decades after
civilisation breaks down, we follow Kirstin, the children actress, now
twenty-six years old and living with the Travelling Symphony, a theatre company
who tour the leftover communicates, preforming Shakespeare plays – ‘because
survival is insufficient.’
So, Shakespeare in
the face of the end of the world. I had high expectations and I was not
disappointed.