It is seen through the eyes of a handful of interconnected characters, all linked by a central figure, a shallowly charismatic movie star named Arthur Leander. There are other levels in “Station Eleven,” which toggles between a pre-flu world very much like our own and the perils of an imagined future. “Station Eleven” offers a soothing meditation on the persistence of the Western cultural canon it’s “Left Behind” for NPR listeners. On one level, “Station Eleven” offers a soothing meditation on the transcendent persistence of the Western cultural canon it’s “Left Behind” for NPR listeners. Most crucially, the story revolves around an itinerant troupe of actors and musicians called the Traveling Symphony, who we find, 20 years after the flu’s onset, wheeling a caravan around Lake Michigan, performing Shakespeare and giving orchestral concerts for small settlements. Both imagine a world of makeshift settlements amid the abandoned detritus of airports, apartment buildings and retail stores.
Station eleven show series#
The popularity of both the novel and the series isn’t hard to explain: Neither dwells in grisly detail on the pandemic or its symptoms, instead focusing on the desperate straits of its haunted survivors in a world without electricity, the internet, air travel, even fuel (gas reserves have gone stale). Still more found it thanks to the exquisitely made HBO Max series that ran from December 2021 to early January of this year. Many more readers discovered it during the lockdowns of Covid-19, finding in Mandel’s book an eerie what-if portrait of a world much further gone than ours, yet still hearteningly resilient. John Mandel’s novel “Station Eleven,” a speculative fiction about a deadly flu that suddenly wipes out 99 percent of the world’s population, was a bestseller in 2014. Have audiences ever really craved contemporaneous entertainment about the everyday tribulations they are facing? On the other hand, the appetite for apocalyptic fables about a world gone violently wrong has always been strong, from “Oedipus Rex” to “The Walking Dead.” This is true even when a plague is not upon us: Emily St. The journey of most of the characters in “Station Eleven” is from self-protective emotional withdrawal to vulnerability and connection. After all, the plagues of Shakespeare’s time and the flu pandemic of 1918, while they exerted sobering influence on the art of their respective ages, were seldom if ever explicitly depicted in narrative fictions at the time. Even after nearly two years, the global pandemic we’re in the midst of hasn’t yet inspired a major work of drama or entertainment.
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