The writer Emily St. John Mandel has been on my reading radar for several months now. So many other readers kept mentioning her that I’d developed a serious case of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). When I asked which book of hers I should read first, everyone recommended Station Eleven. It was my fourth book in a week of self-isolation (stupid Covid-19). Some Covid patients report not being able to read. I’m tremendously relieved and eternally grateful that wasn’t my experience. With all my book reviews I strive not to give away spoilers. But it’s difficult to discuss Station Eleven without some idea of the story plot. Chapter Two ends with these lines:

‘Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on the road out of the city.’

Some of the chapters are short. A page, or less. This keeps the momentum of the story ramped up. I was engaged, focussed, invested. Then, seventeen pages in, I read this and gasped:

‘A story had broken the day before about an alarming new flu in the Republic of Georgia, conflicting reports of mortality rates and death tolls. Details had been sketchy. The name the news outlets were going with – the Georgia Flu – had struck Jeevan as disarmingly pretty.’

This is where I stopped reading to check the publication date of this increasingly ominous close-to-the-bone story. And I saw it was way, waaaay back in the halcyon days of 2014. I’d read seventeen pages, I may as well keep going. What else does a self-isolating Covid patient have to do anyways? That was my thinking.

I discovered that Emily St. John Mandel’s writing is extraordinary. I couldn’t put the book down. First of all, she contravenes all the recommended writing styles I’ve learned about. Sentences are long with limited punctuation and can stretch to paragraph length. But I was so utterly mesmerised by the world she’s created, the characters who live there, the story threads, that I barely noticed. Second of all, because the style doesn’t matter (it works, that’s enough), the writing itself carries everything. Here’s an example of what I mean:

Her face is … on the billboards, flashing a brilliant smile with very red lips, but offscreen she wears no lipstick and seems nervous and shy. She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her.’

Backstory is presented in snapshots. This is very effective, in my opinion. Here, ‘Jeevan’ mentioned above, is reminiscing about his brother, ‘Frank’:

‘…when they were small boys – Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.’

The scope of this book is unimaginably vast. Station Eleven thrums with authenticity, with characters who are flawed, resourceful, believable. It’s a powerful story. As I read the piece about ‘Frank’, I paused to imagine a warehouse wall covered in an elaborate mind map, wondering: how is she going to pull the threads together on this one? But this is exactly what Emily St. John Mandel achieves. A splendid pulling together of threads which creates an enormous planet of a story. It really is huge. And it works so very well indeed.

A line from Star Trek Voyager is repeated throughout the book: Survival is insufficient. For those of us reluctant members of the Covid-19 club who can be treated at home, we know there is paracetamol, water in the tap, vaccines and boosters, healthcare systems, and hope. Also, Leitrim was blessed with good weather this week and I felt well enough to finish reading Station Eleven outdoors. But I was so engrossed in the world that Emily St. John Mandel has built, I almost missed the call for dinner. I put the book down and said, ‘Oh, how can I ever read another book again?’ It’s that good.

I posted on social media that my mind had been officially blown by Station Eleven. In conversation with a Facebook friend, I agreed when she said, ‘Despite the storyline, somehow it wasn’t as bleak as some post-apocalyptic fiction can be.’

The remainder of my evening was spent outdoors in deep discussion with Himself, who hasn’t yet read Station Eleven. I wondered aloud, if ninety-nine percent of people on the planet had died, what would we miss most, assuming we were among the survivors? Where would we go? How would we live? Hypothetically, we decided we’d go to the Wild Atlantic Way along the west coast, where we could fish to eat, grow food, survive. Ireland’s small, so we’d be sharing the land with maybe 50,000 other people. Manageable. Doable. I’d miss books, writing paper, pencils. He’d miss the Internet. Not for contacting anyone, but for access to ‘How to’ YouTube videos and useful survival information. We kept this up until nearly midnight. Station Eleven may well have the same effect on you, too. Take this as fair warning.

An aside that amused me: one character is ‘poking at an olive in a cocktail, using a toothpick’. I like that Emily St. John Mandel wrote ‘toothpick’ rather than ‘cocktail stick’. That’s what I call them myself and it made me smile.

‘Disturbing, inventive and exciting.’ Jessie Burton, author of The Miniaturist.

‘Beautifully written and wonderfully elegiac, a book that I will long remember.’ George R.R. Martin.

‘Glorious, unexpected, superbly written; just try putting it down.’ The Times.

Jo Nestor, retired Adult Educator, writes fulltime. Twice long-listed for the FISH memoir competition, she won the Leitrim Guardian Literary Award, 2020. Her writing features in the 2021 edition of the broadsheet, Autumn Leaves, the Leitrim Guardian, and at www.writing.ie She chooses to live in hope.