Survival is Insufficient
First rate fiction. There is little else you can ask for from literature. Stretches the mind, asks pertinent questions on what it means to be human, is wildly entertaining and is quite wonderfully structured.
The premise is a pandemic, one with an inverse death rate compared to covid (99+%). However the story centers around a famous actor who dies (of natural causes) on stage in the first few chapters. The tendrils of his life, reach out to the distant past and 20 years in the future where most of the plot takes place. It won't all come together until the end, and an unpublished graphic novel, the titular Station Eleven, is the lynchpin of it all.
There are scenes of great brutality and desperation, yet it feels a very realistic if twisted world 20 years later. It is not as bleak or horrific as Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' - maybe because they have more food. His book has but the faintest flicker of light, here there is more, with the 'Star Trek Voyager' Seven of 9 inspired motif "Survival is Insufficient" literally written on the bodies and sideboards of our traveling Shakespeare performing symphony. Hope is the pervading emotion even in the darkest situations.
The parts set in the pre pandemic world are wonderful too, the lives of our characters, mundane or exotic, are skillfully filled out and this really helps punch the reader in the stomach when our modern world, so full of wonder and miracles, is taken away overnight. It is often remarked in the future period that those young enough to not rember the old world have a much easier time, I feel this would be true if true calamity did strike.
It feels so complete as a book I would have thought that they would have struggled to translate it to the screen, though the reviews of the series are good.
I'm glad that it both was an award winning book pre pandemic and a huge success afterwards - it shows it's quality outside of our now common experience of pandemic and just how much she was able to get right about how people and governments would react - often very poorly but with touching moments of humanity. The sense of disbelief, panic, the breaking of some but interestingly not all societal standards and norms are palatable.
Read it!