What Ho Wee Readers, well it’s been a while since I put up a post that wasn’t of the Wee Archive, hasn’t it? I could make excuses, excessive tiredness and a hectic work schedule , but I think that would just annoy us both. So instead, I’ll just ask you to turn your mind away from thoughts of the past posting schedules, and move on to the future. Dare I say it, a post apocalyptic future?

Okay that was a bit corny, but I didn’t know how to more elegantly segue us into talking about Station Elven, one of my top current favourite books. Speaking of…

First published on the 9th September 2014, Mandel’s Station Eleven follows two time periods. One set in the present day, following the life of actor Arthur Leander, a man who dies of a heart attack during the first few pages of the book, and all those that interwove in and out of it during his relatively short time on Earth. Such as his first wife, the creator of a post-apocalyptic comic series named ‘Station Eleven’, his former best friend a corporate psychologist who’s drifted away from him, his second wife and young son who live in a different country, and Kirsten, the young child actress who was there on the stage when he drew his last breath.

The second, tells the story of the travelling symphony- an acting troop making their way through the post-apocalyptic world which the ‘Georgia flue’ has left behind. Kirsten , now an adult, is one of the leading actors in the Travelling Symphony. We follow this ragtag band of misfits as they travel to a previously friendly town, only to discover it has been taken over by a doomsday cult. Where Kirsten will meet the mysterious cult’s Prophet and discover he may have a connection to her past that even she cannot fully comprehend.

That is the basic gist of both interweaving plots, not altogether very well described but there you go. The book flicks back and forth between Arthur Leander’s modern timeline, and Kirsten‘s future to give a grander scope of both the lives of the characters, and how terribly they were disturbed and thrown of course by the tragedy of the Georgian Flue pandemic. An illness that wiped out a sizeable portion of the world’s population very quickly. Huh, why does that sound familiar, when was this written again? 2011? Are all the best writers going turn out to be witches?

Well, regardless it’s little more than a framing device to get us to the post-apocalyptic world, and by extension our main theme of the book. That is the connecting nature of art, of loving art, of doing art, of appreciating art. How when we create a piece of art, and it doesn’t matter what kind – whether it be a painting, a novel, a show, a freaking comic book – we in a sense, are reaching across time to all the generations that have the potential to see and (hopefully) love the work we are creating. And it goes the other way too, when we as modern readers sit down to read something like Shakespeare we connect with an artist, with their voice, their life, that lived hundreds of years before even our grandparents were born.

And I personally never fail to find that astounding.

The book uses its post apocalyptic setting to highlight the connecting nature of the art the characters experience ,with refreshingly frank clarity. Works from the plays of Shakespeare, to episodes of Star Trek, and the impact they have on the characters are openly discussed. The actors of the symphony have deep conversations on whether the works of Shakespeare they often perform still connect to their audiences’ post-civilisation lives, or if they just provide an escape from the day-to-day drudgery that is life now.

However the most illustrating example of this cross generational connection comes from the thing that the book takes its very title from. Namely the in-universe comic book series “Station Eleven”. Set in its own post-apocalyptic world, the comic book tells the story of Doctor Eleven and his giant, flooded, forever in twilight, planet-shaped space station known to all as “Station Eleven”. I could go on to give a detailed summary of the plot of the comic book, telling you all about Doctor Eleven and his fight against the people of the ‘Undersea’, but honestly that matters significantly less both to the book and my point, than then connection it bridges between three people. Who through the courses of their lives build a connection to one another through these pieces of art.

First we have the creator of the work Miranda, the first wife of Arthur Leander, who interestingly enough in a work of fiction, creates the graphic novels of Station Eleven with little to no intention of ever publishing them. Her satisfaction comes from the creation of the work itself and its not until years later, near to the time when civilisation is about to end, when she finally publishes the first three copies at her own expense. It’s an interesting, and highly unique stance for her character to take, but its one I can’t really relate to at this point in my life. So in that vain please take a look at my Short Stories page, where you should find my publish stories. Or at least most of them anyway. I’d also like to point you in the direction of my Fanfiction.net and Ao3 accounts, where you’ll find my fan-fiction work. Because it doesn’t matter if I can’t publish it professionally, and possibly make some money off it, I’m highly proud of what I’ve written and would like as many people to go and look at them as possible. Go ahead,go click on them, we can all wait for the post to continue…

Okay so maybe I don’t have the patience for that.

In the end, possibly because of this, only two other people will read these comics – Kirsten and the Prophet. I don’t want to give away anymore spoilers so I won’t tell you how the Prophet came into possession of these pieces of art, but suffice to say the comics have had a profound affect on these two children and the adults they would become. With Kristen not only were they a connection to a world she could hardly remember anymore, but they were a beautiful distraction to her terrible childhood on the road. For the Prophet they seemed to have become almost a religion, their words mixing with his own odd form of Christianity. Becoming so much a part of his philosophy that when he hears someone else quote them – line for line – for possibly the first time ever, he literally stops dead in his tracks.

These words, written by a corporate executive who died on a beach almost twenty or so years before, connect these two people who could not be anymore different, in such a profound way its as if they speak a language that only they understand. Really, because its such a small sample size, its as we’re seeing an intensified version of the connection made between Shakespeare and Gene Roddenberry by the other players of the traveling symphony.

As artists, when we write words down on a page, or set paint to canvas, or whatever form our art takes, what we do is seek to build a connection with our audience, with our readers, with our patrons and viewers. We might certainly expect this connection between ourselves and the audience in our own time, but what if that spark, that connection goes beyond that? Not only beyond our own time, the years of our life, but beyond the very world, the very civilisation that we live in. Why I think that would be something very close to magic.

This is the feeling, this is the theme, this is the connection that Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven provoked in me. What about you?

If you’ve enjoyed my little philosophical rant why not follow the wee blog if you haven’t already. And make sure to check me out on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Threads (which I’m now on people), Pinterest, Tumblr, TikTok, Goodreads, Facebook and Kofi. Also sign up for the Wee Mailing List before the 6th of August to find out what I’ve been messing around with on Canva for the past month and a bit. Until next time wee readers, keep safe and have a very bonny day.