![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Aug. 21st, 2015 07:54 pmI really liked Station Eleven, though if I wrote it -- and, let's be real, 'post-apocalyptic traveling orchestra and Shakespeare troupe!' is a book I would have loved to write -- I would probably have just spent the whole book on post-apocalyptic performing troupe hijinks and skipped the thematically significant but somewhat less fun digressions back to the pre-apocalypse.
Station Eleven starts off with a famous actor dying of a heart attack onstage, and then verges straight into scary-flu pandemic apocalypse with all the fairly standard hallmarks of a scary-flu pandemic apocalypse: massive death tolls! society disintegrating! terrified people trapped in apartments! Then there's a twenty-year timeskip and everyone is very elegaic because life is hard and the next generation can barely recall all the wonders of the pre-pandemic world and nobody remembers how science works. ((A little suspension of disbelief required for me at how very much nobody remembers how to make science work.) Meanwhile we occasionally jump back in time to the famous actor and various persons entwined with his life, including an ex-wife who is immersed in creating a graphic novel that becomes personally significant to several people in the post-apocalypse.
But in the middle of all this, as I mentioned, is a traveling orchestra and Shakespeare troupe, jaunting around under the motto -- taken from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager -- that "Survival is insufficient."
What made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn't matter who'd used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, althogh someone -- probably Sayid -- had written "Satre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes."
This, that paragraph right there, is basically everything I want in a post-apocalyptic novel. Hope! Optimism! Despair! The power of friendship! Petty whining and bad orchestra jokes! (To be fair, the petty jokes do not have to specifically be orchestra jokes, but I used to play viola once upon a time so I am ALL ON BOARD with orchestra jokes being what they are.) Much of Station Eleven of course is not that, but enough of it is that I found the book very satisfying anyway.
Station Eleven starts off with a famous actor dying of a heart attack onstage, and then verges straight into scary-flu pandemic apocalypse with all the fairly standard hallmarks of a scary-flu pandemic apocalypse: massive death tolls! society disintegrating! terrified people trapped in apartments! Then there's a twenty-year timeskip and everyone is very elegaic because life is hard and the next generation can barely recall all the wonders of the pre-pandemic world and nobody remembers how science works. ((A little suspension of disbelief required for me at how very much nobody remembers how to make science work.) Meanwhile we occasionally jump back in time to the famous actor and various persons entwined with his life, including an ex-wife who is immersed in creating a graphic novel that becomes personally significant to several people in the post-apocalypse.
But in the middle of all this, as I mentioned, is a traveling orchestra and Shakespeare troupe, jaunting around under the motto -- taken from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager -- that "Survival is insufficient."
What made it bearable were the friendships, of course, the camaraderie and the music and the Shakespeare, the moments of transcendent beauty and joy when it didn't matter who'd used the last of the rosin on their bow or who anyone had slept with, althogh someone -- probably Sayid -- had written "Satre: Hell is other people" in pen inside one of the caravans, and someone else had scratched out "other people" and substituted "flutes."
This, that paragraph right there, is basically everything I want in a post-apocalyptic novel. Hope! Optimism! Despair! The power of friendship! Petty whining and bad orchestra jokes! (To be fair, the petty jokes do not have to specifically be orchestra jokes, but I used to play viola once upon a time so I am ALL ON BOARD with orchestra jokes being what they are.) Much of Station Eleven of course is not that, but enough of it is that I found the book very satisfying anyway.
