Emily St John Mandel opens ‘station eleven’ (Picador, 2014) with actor Arthur Leander collapsing on stage in his role of King Lear. A part he had always sought to play. Unbeknownst to the audience of the Toronto theatre, a virus has arrived in the city off a plane from Moscow. Deadly with transmission quick as a knife.
Emily St John Mandel’s deployment of Lear as the opening scene to her pandemic novel acts as a foreboding cue.
How many would be dead by the end of her novel? How will we count the losses?
When I read the opening segments of ‘station eleven’ my gut feeling is that St John Mandel has her character focus on the loss of power. The event that would transform the world had already happened. That most of the audience were within days of death.
Lear is many things. Power, and the loss of it being a key plot development. Opening with a major political mistake, he loses control both of his cognitive abilities, his speech, his knights. Simon Russell Beale who portrayed Lear (2019, the National Theatre, dir. Sam Mendes) admitted that he still struggles to understand the rationale behind Lear’s decision making, and highlights how this is a weaker part of the play’s writing. I interpret Simon to be saying that it’s hard to establish the motivations of the character to inform his telling of this scene.
To me there’s something of meteorological scale going on. There’s this idea that the King is of godly nature, a higher power or more abstract force. It would be like asking ourselves why has the pandemic begun. To a citizen Lear is an unfathomable greater power, well beyond our control. Here is an act that like so much of our lives experience is void of rational or decision, and we as agents and subjects must navigate through it.
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In the UK, COVID lockdown measures were neither uniform nor planned. Enduring lockdown has been the consequence of a virus that had spiraled totally out of control before we adapted. A virus that continued to scythe our communities when we relaxed back to some form of normality.
Re-reading ‘station eleven’ the surprises are not in how we Emily St John Mandel foresaw a pandemic, but rather how much of our lives now resemble a story. It’s felt like living in a novel in that there’s a dramatic event at the start that impacts everything that we experience from that point onward. We may not be scavenging for food, but I can’t think of a decision nor action that I now make in isolation from the pandemic. My sleep patterns, washing, eating, reading, working.
Every piece of living is now the extension of this singular event. Our surroundings are all part of a storyteller’s economy for detail. Like walking down mainstreet in a spaghetti western, all the shop fronts have been placed there to fit this narrative. Only telling us things that further engross us in the story.
At the end of ‘station eleven’ from the top of an airport control tower, no longer required as air travel has come to a halt following societal collapse the characters gaze over a woodland to see a town that has managed to illuminate the street lighting, some 20 years after the electricity ran out.
There is a feeling within me that we are able to build our interior lives anew, now that the old tyrant Lear has died.
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