レビュー要約

• 人物描写と主題の明確さを評価する声がある一方、静かな展開や重い題材をじっくり読む作品として受け止められている。

レビュー

• Read it.

  I sat and read this all day. I had to keep reading. I bought it on the recommendation of a friend and knew nothing about it at all. That was a great way to enter the world, well, world's, of this book, things gradually revealing and unraveling before circling back to a very pleasing closure. The book deals with horrendous events on both a grand scale and also on an individual scale but conveys the awfulness and despair without ever dipping into grotesqueness or the unrelenting bleakness of "The Road", by Cormack MacCarthy, for example. The main notes I got from the book were of a haunting realisation of what was lost. This is definitely tempered with hints of hope and also of appreciation of the real things in life, but for me it left me feeling somewhat in awe of the way we are able to go about our lives these days. The way the book is structured is very impressive. I am utterly unqualified to comment further on it, other than to add that it is greatly pleasing.

• ジャンルを超えて全米図書賞最終候補になったディストピア小説

  吹雪の夜、トロントの劇場でシェイクスピアのKing Learを演じていたハリウッドの有名俳優Arthurがステージ上で心臓発作で急死する。 だが、劇場の外では、もっと大きな悲劇が世界を襲っていた。 潜伏期間が異常に短く致死率が９９％のインフルエンザが急速に広まっていたのだ。人類の大部分が死滅し、電気、交通手段、コミュニケーション手段など、１０００年以上かけて進化した文明が失われてしまう。 インフルエンザ流行から２０年が経った現在、King Learの劇で子役を演じていた８歳のKirstinは、Traveling Symphonyの一員になっていた。あちこちに分散して生き残っているコミュニティを渡り歩いてシェイクスピアの演劇と音楽を提供するので、当然のごとく危険と背中合わせだ。それに、楽団に加わるまでには、全員が恐ろしい体験をしている。 二年前に訪問した村を再び訪問したとき、楽団は村の雰囲気がすっかり変わっているのに危機感を覚える。世紀末的な新興宗教が乗っ取ってしまったのだ。楽団は演奏後すぐにそこを離れるが、団員が次から次に姿を消す。消えたメンバーの探索に出かけたKirstinと親友は楽団から切り離され、単独で次の目的地に向かうことになる。 読んでいるときに連想したのは、Cormac McCarthyのThe Roadや、Peter HellerのThe Dog Starsである。 けれども、MandelのStation Elevenのほうが人類への希望を感じさせる。これは著者が若いからなのか、根本的な人類への信頼なのかは興味深いところだ。 ジャンルとしてはSFであり、そこに「Station Eleven」と新興宗教の謎も含まれていて少々ミステリ／スリラーの雰囲気もある。そのうえ、背景にシェイクスピアとグラフィックノベルが流れている。これまでも、ディストピア小説のThe Roadや、アトウッドのスペキュラティブ・フィクションは文芸小説として扱われてきたけれども、この作品はもっとジャンル小説に近い読み応えだった。ふだんから「ジャンル小説差別」を苦々しく思っているので、Station Elevenのようなジャンルを超えた小説が全米図書賞の最終候補になったのを喜ばしく思う。

• 不思議なお話？

  NYT紙のベストセラーリストに入っていたので、購入。 伝染病で人類が滅亡寸前となる終末論的な設定でありながら、内容は全くパニック物ではなく、寧ろ淡々としたトーンでお話は進みます。掴み所がない独特な雰囲気は理解出来ましたが、肝心のテーマ自体が今一つ掴めず、作品を味わうことが出来ませんでした。☆3つはよく分らなかったという意味です、スミマセン。

• New book ordered received used one

  This book seems to be resale, we see pencil lines

• Good book

  Good book

• Another Brilliant Novel by Emily St. John Mandel

  This was my third Emily St. John Mandel novel and I’m officially hooked. She’s a great writer with a wild imagination and an uncanny ability of throwing a bunch of characters and plot lines out and then somehow tying them all together by the end. Station Eleven (which was published in 2014) involves a pandemic that wipes out 99% of mankind. Some of the people who are left form communities that come together and help each other while others become “feral,” marauding the countryside and taking whatever they can to survive. It’s a fascinating book that jumps back and forth between the pre-pandemic days (specifically the very last day before the world changed forever) and post-pandemic. Mandel introduces a number of disparate people who will somehow all be connected by the end of the book by a graphic novel that one of them wrote (that’s what’s peaking out of the cover BTW - a brilliant image that I only noticed when I finished the book). Here’s an example of what a great story teller Mandel is. She focuses on a fictional airport where a number of planes are diverted on that last day. Everyone in the terminal is seemingly healthy and has somehow been spared infection from this horrible disease (“If you’re exposed, you’re sick in three or four hours and dead in a day or two.”) Then another plane lands and sits on the tarmac for a while. The people in the airport are told there’s been an outbreak on that flight. The doors of that plane never open and Mandel never takes us inside the cabin to witness the devastation first hand. The most she offers us is years later, when that plane is still sealed, one of the characters tells themselves: “Don’t think of that unspeakable decision, to keep the jet sealed rather than expose a packed airport to a fatal contagion. Don’t think about what enforcing that decision may have required. Don’t think about those last few hours on board.” It’s not the only time she does that in this book but it’s the most obvious. She eschews the goriest details and offers us instead the guilt that the survivors must bear. Just brilliant! Emily St. John Mandel’s website says she’s published six novels. So far she’s 3 for 3 in my books so I will be catching up on the ones I’ve yet to read. If you’re looking for a fast paced page turner I’d highly recommend Station Eleven.

• Easy read. Suits any age.

  The book arrived “as new”. A great read for Utopian readers. Great imagination for a world without internet. A book that I keep on my shelf to share. Suits any age.

• Amazing

  There is something simply both mesmerizing and intimate about St. John Mandel’s prose. And after a pandemic and our world seemingly sliding towards even more uncertain futures something this book is both bittersweet and hopeful.

• A compelling story with great characterisation

  I've just finished reading Station Eleven and absolutely loved it. I bought this book such a long time ago and since then have seen plenty of glowing reviews but for some reason I've hesitated to pick it up. I don't think I really knew what to expect when I started to read and perhaps that was a good thing. What I did know was that it was a book about the end of civilisation and so I admit I was expecting a rather gloomy and foreboding read. What I found instead was a book that was actually quite beautiful with a cast of really well drawn characters whose lives touch in meaningful ways as the story unfolds. I was absolutely fascinated by this story and could barely tear myself away from the pages. At the start of the novel we make the introduction of Arthur Leander, a successful actor currently appearing in a theatre production of King Leah who unfortunately suffers a heart attack and dies on stage. Jeevan Chaudhary is watching the play with his girlfriend and being a newly qualified EMT has recognised the signs and has rushed to Arthur's aid. Meanwhile, watching the drama from the wings is a child actress named Kirsten Raymonde. This scene will remain one of her few memories of the time before the collapse of civilisation. Basically, the world is about to be devastated by a fast acting mutated flu virus that will kill so many people that humans almost face extinction. From here the plot does quite a lot of jumping around, back and forth to the years before the collapse and then jumping to approximately 20 years after and we get to follow the lives of these main characters as their paths intersect or once again come together. I have to applaud the style used here as really Arthur, having died in the opening stages of the book, should have very little input into the story but instead the way in which the story is told allows him to become the central focus for all the other characters, he's the sun and they're all orbiting him in some way. In the pre collapse years we observe Arthur on his path to fame and fortune, his three failed marriages and ultimately his reflections on his own life just shortly before he passes away. It very much feels like Arthur has been acting out his own life rather than really living it, moving through the motions and casually dropping people along the way. His first wife Miranda is the one who has the biggest impact on him and although the relationship is ultimately doomed the two clearly still share feelings for each other. Miranda in fact also has an impact on the story. She's an unusual character who seems herself to be something of a loner. Her life's work has revolved around a graphic novel called Station Eleven that not only gives the book it's title but has quite an impact on a couple of the key people. Station Eleven has an almost prophetic feel to it - we don't really gain an insight into the full plot but we are given certain snippets. It seems that Miranda, at certain points is inserting parts of her own story into that of her graphic novel but in terms of other elements there is a strange reflective quality for what takes place in later years. For example, Station Eleven is a small space station, shaped like a planet, that due to damage is ultimately covered with water and little remote islands. Thinking about the environment after the collapse the towns themselves, whilst not surrounded by water, are themselves like isolated islands. There is no quick means of travelling from A to B and no way of easily connecting with other people. No phones, no internet, no planes or cars. In the later years of the story we follow in the tracks of a theatre company called The Travelling Symphony. An eclectic bunch of characters who travel from town to town providing entertainment and music to the people they come across. Kirsten is a member of the company. Only a child before the collapse she remembers very little of civilisation. She has a tattoo on her arm that is a quote from Star Trek - even though she has no real memory of the show itself. She knows that as a child she experienced electricity, lighting at the flick of a switch, travel using planes and cars and yet these things are but distant memories - she knows they were a part of her life before but really she can't recall them and they have a dreamlike quality in this new era of darkness. At this point the plot diverges a little when the Travelling Symphony return to a town they previously played at, St. Deborah by the Water, but which seems to have undergone something of a transformation. It seems that the town is now in the grip of a new gang of characters headed by somebody known as 'The Prophet'. Clearly St Deborah is not a safe place to travel through any longer and the travelling thespians leave in something of a hurry. There were a number of things that I really loved about this book. First and foremost is the author's ability to make these characters stand out. Their stories are so intriguing that I was captivated by them all. What makes this an even more impressive feat is that this isn't a doorstopper sized novel and yet the author makes each of these characters compelling to read about. I literally cared for them and was in places scared for their safety. Which brings me to the next thing that really impressed me. Yes, this is a book that could be very dismal to read but it isn't. We read about the slow collapse of so many things that we take for granted in our every day lives but rather than turn this into a blood battle with gangs of almost feral packs of people committing unspeakable acts in the name of survival, the book focuses on the people who are surviving and the lives they're leading. Undoubtedly, over the years, terrible things have happened, and most of the survivors have the scars that bear witness to such acts but I found this intriguing and hopeful rather than gloomy and dreadful. I thoroughly enjoyed Station 11 and have no hesitation in recommending it. If you want a compelling story full of heart then definitely give this a try.

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