Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

I had this crazy idea all of a sudden, that I was going to go and read as many of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction longlisted books as I could. This was a moment of madness; I am already committed to TBR20 (with 3 books still to go), and the longlist is called a longlist for a reason (dur, because it is long) and somehow this whole idea spiralled me into a fundamental question about my relationship with reading, this blog and what I’m doing it all for. Which is perhaps an entry for another day when my mind is clearer and I’ve worked it all out. Anyway, the point is that it’s against this backdrop that I read Station Eleven and in some ways it is the book itself which prompted the question. Not necessarily a terrible thing.

Station Eleven is a post apocalyptic novel. The story begins with a play, a production of King Lear. The actor playing Lear, Arthur Leander, has a heart attack on stage. A man watching the play, Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic, tries to save him. He fails. As Arthur’s body is rolled away Jeevan comforts a child actress, Kirsten, who plays a non-speaking role as one of Lear’s daughters – something of a dreamlike scene – who had grown fond of Arthur. As Jeevan leaves the theatre he is contacted by a friend who works at a hospital about a virulent strain of flu which is flooding the hospital. Everyone is dying. So the story begins.

Within a week most of the population has died. There is no way to know how much. The usual happens: the lights go out, TV goes off, the internet shuts down, people shoot people in the streets, food runs out, etc. The story of Station Eleven centres around those people connected to the Lear actor, Arthur Leander and we see both the before and after story, again all centring around Leander. We learn of his ex-wife, Miranda, who was an artist, creator of a series of graphic novels called ‘Station Eleven’ from which the title of the book comes. Station Eleven is an advanced space station that is designed to resemble a small planet. It was stolen by Dr. Eleven, a man who took his name from the station, after the Earth was overtaken by a hostile force. Now Station Eleven hides in deep space and its inhabitants are torn between remaining hidden, accepting their new lives, or returning to Earth. As with most worlds, there is an underclass – the Undersea – rebels who seek to return to their roots. The comic book serves as both a reflection of this new world and an idea of how it could be.

The story spins back and forth between the before and after, though rather deliberately. The stories of each of the protagonists unfolds as they each come to terms with their existing world and the world that is unfolding. There is some beautiful writing along the way, like here:

“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.”

There are also some interesting references, like the line from Star Trek Voyager “Survival is insufficient” which as a Seven-of-Nine fan was kind of nice to see there, and there’s a sense that this is a post apocalyptic novel for a new generation, though the references back to Shakespeare are frequent. I think there’s a cleverness there that I’ve missed, but there’s a general sense of a cleverness missed, a self-referencing, the plot a little too deliberate and the slipping back and forth through time more deliberate than unsettling.

Though I was not in the best frame of mind for reading Station Eleven, I’m not sure that’s why I didn’t really like it. There are a few core things which made this a book that was difficult for me to like. For a start, I’m not a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction; I think on this genre there is simply nothing left to say (that may, of course, simply be my lack of imagination) or perhaps nothing left to say that McCarthy’s The Road didn’t already do with impeccable brevity. I don’t think Mandel brings anything new to it here. Yes, she talks of the internet, of the plenty which is not appreciated, the toys we would have to give up and their marvellous complexities: mobile phones, laptop computers, etc. The theatre continues. Some people regret the passing, some people revel in it.

Then there was Station Eleven itself, the comic book. I liked the comic book, I liked the themes it covered and I found myself more interested in the idea of the comic book than the book I was reading. I wished Station Eleven existing, I’d read it. But I’m not sure the point of it gelled here. It just seemed strangely ancillary, and it wasn’t alone. There was a lot that seemed strangely ancillary, disjointed. The prophet, the book about Leander’s life, Clark, the tattoos. Perhaps Mandel was trying to point out that life post-apocalypse would be disjointed, disconnected; that there would be gaps, stories untold, that life would not be a seamless narrative. But that’s how it is now; there is no seamless narrative.

It’s not a bad novel, it would be wrong for me to say that. I enjoyed, to a degree, reading the book and it’s well written and interesting. Perhaps it is simply my prejudice against the post-apocalyptic novel expressing itself here, but for me this book just didn’t quite work; something about it just wasn’t fully realised. It felt like an unfulfilled potential, that Mandel was skirting around something brilliant and just didn’t quite grasp it.

What it did achieve was the huge questioning around how and why I read. Something about reading this book, the feeling of missing the mark, made me realise that reading had become almost a soulless activity. That the books that are great, the ones that really move me are infrequent. This has become particularly true since I’ve been reading more. The more I read, the more infrequently the books that mean something to me become, the more books that I read the more ‘middling’ ones crop up. And it becomes more infrequent for me to return to a loved classic. I think this is something that worries me, that the more driven I am to read the latest and latest books, the further away I become from the re-read, the delving into a familiar friend, the books that stir something meaningful in my mind. I think I am in danger of becoming nothing more than a consumer, and that’s not what I want to be. There is reading as an act of consumption and reading as an act of nutrition. I feel I have moved too far away from the latter. That’s not what reading is for me.

The Table of Less Valued Knights by Marie Phillips

There are certain things that don’t happen in my reading activities very often: books which I read in a day and funny books. The Table of Less Valued Knights surprised me by being both of those. I picked it up on a whim on a visit to the library on a day I was crazed from book acquisition starvation towards the end of my TBR20, which I seem hell-bent on never allowing myself to finish. I still haven’t finished. It’s been three months now, I may never buy another book.

Anyway, ignoring my book-buying withdrawal symptoms, I was attracted to this Baileys Prize longlisted book because it is different from the books I ordinarily read. It’s not serious for a start (except when it is) and it’s set in King Arthur’s court making it fantasy/historical which is a genre I generally avoid like the plague. Yet what I found was a very fresh, very entertaining, very current story about the danger of appearances and the stupidity of putting people, and fiction, into stereotypical boxes.

Our stories follows Sir Humphrey du Val, one of King Arthur’s knights. Specifically a knight of the ‘Table of Less Valued Knights’. To explain:

“For there were two other tables in the Great Hall of Camelot, two tables less sung of by storytellers and balladeers, in fact barely mentioned at all. One was known as the Table of Errant Companions. Oval in shape, tucked in the shadowy space beneath the minstrels’ gallery, it housed those young upstarts who aspired to the Round Table, who busied themselves with minor quests and prayed for a precious chair in proximity to Arthur. The other table, to be found in the draughtiest corner furthest away from either of the fires, was rectangular, and had one leg shorter than the other so that it always had to be propped up with a folded napkin to stop it from rocking. It was home to the elderly, the infirm, the cowardly, the incompetent and the disgraced, and was called the Table of Lesser Valued Knights.”

It is Pentecost, and the Knights are waiting for the Pentecost quest to arrive. Sir Humphrey is bored, hungry and irritable. Less Valued Knights are not permitted to go on quests. When the Pentecost quest arrives, it is a strange man: Edwin, who claims to be King of Puddock though, as Humphrey observes “Puddock had a queen now. So this must be her husband. But surely that made him Prince Consort?” It is a theme which recurs often in the book. Edwin’s wife, the actual queen, has been kidnapped, and the Pentecost quest is therefore to discover her kidnappers and recover her. The quest falls to the knight which volunteers the fastest, which in this case falls to Sir Dorien Pendoggett, the Errant Companion who took Humphrey’s place at the table. Humphrey is not pleased.

As Humphrey is hanging around the hall later, sleepless and grouchy, a lady turns up. Lady Elaine, it seems, is a damsel in distress (not quite the typical kind) whose fiancé had been kidnapped just as they were to ‘plight their troth’. Humphrey sees an opportunity here, suspecting that the Lady Elaine’s quest is, in fact, the ‘true’ Pentecostal quest given that a damsel in distress ‘trumps a king’ in quest hierarchy. In such circumstances, Humphrey should wake Arthur’s court and allow the true knights to compete for the honour of fulfilling Lady Elaine’s quest. However, Humphrey decides to cheat the rules and take the quest for himself. He wakes his half-giant squire, Conrad with whom he has a shared and complex history which includes the story of how Humphrey is demoted to the Lesser Value’ table, Jemima the elephant (Conrad’s ‘steed’) and together they set out to find the Lady Elaine’s missing  fiancé.

If one thing is true about this story, it is that nothing is quite what it seems. The Lady Elaine is not a traditional damsel in distress, Sir Humphrey is not the traditional knight and Conrad not the traditional squire. Edwin, The King of Puddock is no king and his kidnapped wife, the Queen Martha, is not entirely his wife, entirely kidnapped or entirely female. Phillips spends much of the novel ever-so-slightly perverting the traditional roles in a traditional story of this type, with amusing side effects. In the process she also highlights the hazard of making judgement on appearances or convention and the differences in treatment between men and women – this particularly seen through Martha’s story, as described here:

“She hadn’t realised how different life was for me. They looked her straight in the eye when they spoke, asking her questions and listening to her answers, treating her with the easy, casual respect of equals. She liked it, but she was thrown by the expectation that she would have something to contribute to the conversation. The frustration that she had felt as a girl her entire life – that nobody believed her to be competent at anything – was replaced by the terror that her competence was now assumed. Either way, her actual abilities didn’t seem to come into it.”

This is an amusing, satirical novel which is also extremely entertaining to read. It addresses the question of gender bias and gender opportunity through humour and a slightly offbeat cast of characters who never quite act in the way you’d expect them to. Gender is not its only target: traditional power roles, the image of the ‘knight in shining armour’, marriage, sexuality, jealousy and appearance are all targets of Phillip’s satirical eye. And in the traditional, perhaps the only traditional sense here, way of a good satire it’s strikingly and uncomfortably accurate. I found The Table of Less Valued Knights a very engaging read that sneaks its message in with a joke, until you realise it isn’t really sneaky at all: it’s the carrot-eating elephant in the room – she’s called Jemima and she’s about to poop all over your nice, new shoes.