Station Eleven and the Allure of the Apocalypse
I just finished reading Station Eleven yesterday, after blowing through it in just a couple of days (which is pretty quick for me at this point in my life; sadly, I can no longer stay up until the wee hours to finish a book). Like a lot of people, I loved it; it's easily among the best things I've read all year.
The story is simple: A fast-moving super-flu wipes out most of Earth's population in a matter of days, and the few survivors have to learn to cope in their radically altered world. The premise isn't that different from many other post-apocalyptic fictions, but where Mandel really shines is in the way she tells the story, drawing connections between the survivors and their lives both before the outbreak and in the aftermath. The details are beautiful and often spooky--I can't, for example, get the image of the jet full of flu-stricken passengers parked at the edge of an airfield out of my mind.
As I was reading through Station Eleven, I also found myself wondering about the appeal of these nightmare doomsday scenario stories, especially in this cultural moment. Obviously, stories about the end of the world as we know are hardly new. But right now, a lot of people seem especially fixated on the idea that civilization as we know if could collapse with just the tiniest of shoves. And often, the apocalypse is something that we've brought upon ourselves, at least indirectly--air travel is key to the spread of the flu in Mandel's book; in Edan Lepucki’s California, it's climate change (presumably human-caused) that seems to kick off the crisis. And even if the causes are obscure, our current systems buckle under strain of a true meltdown, like on The Walking Dead, where the CDC has been blown up, the military is AWOL, and the few police that are left have transformed themselves into mini-dictators.
Why do I read these books? Why do I regularly tune in to The Walking Dead, even though I dislike on-screen violence and cover my eyes during all the zombie head-smashing scenes? I wonder if watching our world go to hell again and again is some kind of wish fulfillment. Do we think we’ve made such a mess of the world we’ve been given that the idea of starting over from scratch is appealing? Is it anxiety about our modern life and dependence on technology? Or perhaps our fear that, despite all the incredible advancements in health care we’ve made over the past 100 years, there's a disease lurking out there that's going to destroy us?
I think one of the most telling things about many of these recent apocalypse narratives is that they don't exactly have happy endings (if a happy ending could be defined as traditional authority figures stepping in and making everything right, like Bill Pullman's president in Independence Day). Ultimately, it's the institutions that we expect to protect us that fail. A big reason I found Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion such a boring film was that while its vision of a highly contagious disease was scary, the pandemic was ultimately containable. A bad thing happened, but the systems we set up to deal with those situations worked. That's certainly what I hope would happen in real life. But it makes for a pretty dull film or novel.
P.S. I posted this while watching old episodes of Doomsday Preppers on Netflix. Because of course.
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