Kristen is heading south, and Jeevan I think is in Virginia somewhere, but the lights I assume are not that far off.
I can think of animal populations that were decimated by humans (dodo birds, passenger pigeons) in no time, but not by disease.
Yes, Arthur died of a heart attack. Jeevan gets the call from his friend at the hospital that someone from Russia has died there that morning and it’s already spread not just to others on the plane, but also someone with brief contact at the airport. It’s possible there were infected people in the audience, but Arthur wasn’t one of them.
Yes, Jeevan is settled in what was Virginia, and Kirsten and the troupe are at the Severn City Airport in Michigan. They are pretty far away from one another. I think Jeevan’s identity is one piece of the puzzle of her past that Kirsten will never have.
As for the theatre-goers, my impression was that none of them were actually contagious on the night of the play. As soon as they stepped outside the building, though, all bets were off: “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” (p. 15).
Sidebar - NJTheatermom… Yes, I mentioned the writing style, but also predicted you might not like this book, and just like you I thought the beginning was stunning.And, as you stated the " Hollywood/ celebrity" element was like interjecting " people magazine" or " inquirer " magazine, popular audience appeal.
However, I did say what a plot driven page turner it was ( for me) and, it was a good selection.Sadly, many books bore me and I don’t finish many, so when I find a " page turner", as was " The Paying Guests" which I just finished, I consider those good reads ------
Here is part of my message to you…
“I just started the last chapter of Stations Eleven. I find it a page turner, at this point, but the writing style has much to be desired. On many occasions I have wondered " I can just imagine what NJ TheaterMom thinks about that sentence” !! You represent someone who leans towards a more academic/ intellectual selection, and I wondered if Stations Eleven required toothpicks to get through."
Caraid and Mary and mathmom: Funny, I never thought of it as just a heart attack. Arthur wakes tired, achy, sweaty, etc. - looks ill his last day. I just figured that he collapses with the flu as underlying cause. I guess I need to rethink.
Sidebar 2 - this was the only other thing I wrote about the book to NJTheatermom
“I assumed you had finished STATIONS ELEVEN- I wouldn’t have made the comment. Its such a readable book,you will finish it quickly,. Its plot driven, a page turner, and weaves the past nicely through the story. I’m glad I read it, a good selection and will expand the CC participation.”
I seem to remember Jeevan being farther away. I saw the symphony’s movement to the south as a sign of hope, towards the electricity and a rekindling of civilization.
NJTM, what were they smoking in those pipes, lol? I thought the same thing, especially since one of the early passengers went through nicotine withdrawal. I do think it likely that tobacco from the south would be grown and traded. Otherwise, there are all kinds of substitutes–rabbit tobaccos. Wouldn’t it be great to think that after a catastrophe of this source, tobacco would go away?
Not to skip around too much, but one character and plot path I really disliked was the prophet and his crazy religion, or whatever it was. Again, it seemed like a nasty leap to recreate this monstrous prophet from a little boy who read the new testament over and over.
I thought the book was okay. I didn’t really find it to be a page turner, largely because I didn’t care much about any or the characters. I continued reading because I thought it would get better. The prophet story was given short shrift and the clues regarding his identity were heavy-handed. I thought a more nuanced telling of the prophet story would have been much more interesting.
Hey SJCM: Like you, I thought of Cloud Atlas when subtle connections cropped up across characters, time, place.
Regarding the Prophet, I would think that “prophets” would thrive in a (post)apocalyptic world where survivors feel guilt, look for meaning. And SJCM the Prophet caused enough trouble … for me.
@NJTheatreMom, I thought the bed sheets were used to make tents for privacy indoors, not outdoors in the cold weather.
The prophet demonstrated one of the many different ways people might deal with an apocalyptic world. He was an awful character, but I believe his character would occur in this type of event. I was surprised he was killed before having a confrontation with Clark.
I agree that the prophet seemed to be an underdeveloped character. However, the image of him as a child standing outside of the plane reading scripture was chilling.
I did enjoy the book and found it to be an easy read. I wish there would have been more about the Symphony performing in the different settlements.
I saw Arthur and Kirsten as the main characters but I like the one comment here today that the main character could have been Clark. His presence in the story tied up several loose ends. I can’t say that I particularly liked any of the characters except Miranda and she didn’t have a huge presence in the story.
Hi NJTM! I always look forward to your perspective. You keep me grounded.
I flew through the novel and the writing didn’t bother me at all. That said, neither did I pause to re-read a passage that I found particularly lovely, as I sometimes do with other books. Maybe that means the writing was subpar, but I never noticed because I was enjoying the story so much. I turned the pages quickly because I wanted to find out what happened next and I liked the characters with whom I was “journeying.” Except for Arthur. He didn’t appeal to me, either.
I saw the “goofs” differently—that is, not as goofs, they made sense to me. It’s fascinating how we can each interpret sections in such different ways! This was my take on NJTM’s examples:
Jeevan is the one smoking tobacco, and since he lives in Virginia…heck, I figure that’s the one place in the world that might be cultivating it again by Year 15. We do know that Jeevan’s neighbors work in the fields of “the old plantation” (p. 272). If my chain-smoking father had survived the Apocalypse, I’m quite sure that the first thing he would do is plant tobacco.
You’re right, the jingling coins in the pocket don’t make sense as legal tender in that world. But they belong to August, who earlier has been rehearsing a scene (as Edgar) in *King Lear*, and coins play a part in that Act, so why not? I would definitely not have accepted jingling coins in the pocket of anyone else, though.
@Caraid is correct--the bedsheet tents are indoors. The occupants of the airport, longing for privacy, take the bedsheets and make “a double line of tents down the length of Concourse B” (p. 306). I pictured a wide, long hallway something like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/86/Inside_IAD_Concourse_B.jpg
(The tents that the Traveling Symphony uses are real, not made from sheets. Kirsten’s is 30 years old and has fallen apart, so she moves into Dieter’s.)
Very good defense of the suppposed goofs, Mary. But what about the musicians in the troupe playing a Beethoven symphony. How could they have done that without a full score? Where would they have obtained one?
I agree that prophet characters would probably thrive in this environment, but since there was only one in this book, I would have liked for him to be a more complicated, and perhaps conflicted character, rather than simply evil.
I don’t know. It never occurred to me that it might be a challenge to get sheet music; I never gave it a thought. I figured that everything that wasn’t edible or necessary for survival would be there for the taking—but I admit I wouldn’t have any idea where to start if I were in search of a Beethoven symphony. I’m clueless on that score. (Sorry, couldn’t resist. )
Agree on both counts. Mandel managed to take a very minor character—the boy from the Prophet’s group who saves Kirsten and then kills himself—and make him both complicated and conflicted. She had more backstory and more pages devoted to the Prophet, yet for the most part, he comes across as a stock villain. I didn’t want him to be left out of the book; I wanted him to be more complex.
Good point, Mary13 and cartera, But considering that all the characters were underdeveloped, I thought he was the most dispensable. Or maybe Arthur was the most dispensable. Throw out Arthur and beef up the prophet, even though he is a creep. Keep the archetype and ditch the film star, lol.
I thought there was enough tension with the killing Georgia Flu and end of civilization, that the prophet part could have been eliminated entirely! I want to know how the boy’s eventual actions as a man in this future world were related to his father’s parenting skills (or lack thereof), or his kooky mom’s. The prophet story line seemed to indicate something the the author’s feelings on religion, and I didn’t care for the way she used Arthur’s boy to get her view across. I need to go back and read about Elizabeth again. But from what I remember, she was a beautiful but perhaps not so intelligent actress who fell in love with a married man, and then divorced from him after he moved on to the next wife. She had their child and moved to Israel. She’s still accustomed to the first class lounge! How does she become the mother of a child who recites the new testament to the plane full of flu victims? The only clue was when she stated that the flu was part of a divine plan. What happened to her to cause this conversion? Was it the trauma of the flu pandemic or had something occurred earlier, as a result of her relationship with Arthur? This is the example of character underdevelopment that bugs me most in the book
It didn’t bother me that they had a Beethoven score. Not everything got destroyed in the riots and plundering that followed the plague. They could have survived all sorts of places. I wondered what other plays they did, the only ones that get mentioned (I think) are Romeo and Juliet and King Lear. I’m pretty sure they did Hamlet, but did they do the Scottish play or some of the comedies? Or my my favorite - Twelfth Night?
We didn’t really see enough of Elizabeth and the boy I don’t think to know exactly what in his upbringing might push him in that direction.We have no idea at all why she chose to go to Israel. But that the post-plague environment would create such people in larger than normal numbers seems quite plausible to me. I can’t imagine the book without him. I don’t think he’s dispensable at all.
Pre-collapse, Elizabeth is described alternately as “shy,” “nervous,” “malnourished” and “alcoholic.” Afterward, living in the airport, “she was beginning to stare in a terrible way that made people afraid of her” (p. 250). I don’t think she so much converted as went off the deep end. Before the Georgia flu, she liked to spout the platitude that “everything happens for a reason;” after the flu, she hangs on to the phrase like a lifeline. She drums into Tyler that he has been saved for a reason, and he grows up with a Messiah complex.
I thought that Mandel was making a statement on spirituality, not organized religion per se. Elizabeth tells Clark that she and Tyler are leaving Severn City because “We just want to live a more spiritual life…my son and I” (p. 261). But the “spiritual life” that Tyler adopts can’t have been what Elizabeth wanted. I wonder if seeing what he had become is what led to her “death of the soul.”
The flip side of the equation is August, the other spiritual character in the book. His prayers over long-dead bodies are a tender, loving ritual—yet are they so very different from Tyler’s prayers to the long-dead people in the airplane?
As a child, August is “quiet and a little shy,” “had never been especially adept at getting along with people,” and “spent an enormous amount of time before the collapse watching television” (p. 39). Tyler is inconsolable when his Nintendo stops working and he “spoke so rarely that it was easy to forget he was there” (p. 253). The two are very close in age. What makes children with seemingly similar temperaments channel their spirituality in such disparate ways? I read once in an essay on the saints that, “there is a fine line between mystical vocation and madness.”
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