Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Station Eleven is one of the more original novels I've read in some time. It describes a world where a deadly flu virus has killed more than ninety-nine per cent of the Earth's population. But this isn't a simple dystopian/survival novel, although it has elements of that. It's also somewhat 'six degrees of separation' as it follows the lives of several people caught up in events on the last day before the flu wreaked havoc.
    And it all begins on stage at the Elgin Theatre in Toronto with the Act Four death of Arthur Leander due to cardiac arrest. Although Arthur will not be around for the 'end of the world as we know it' that follows, he is the character that connects the others, one way or another.
    Leaping on stage to give CPR, is Jeevan Chaudhary, a trainee paramedic. Jeevan was at one time a paparazzo who stalked Leander, one of the most celebrated actors of his day and with a gossip-worthy social life. It is through Jeevan, that the reader gets to take in the dawning horror of the pandemic, the panic hoarding of groceries, the final decision to abandon the city in an attempt to survive.
    Also on stage is child actor, Kirsten Raymonde, who is still playing Shakespeare twenty years later with a travelling orchestra. The world has altered enormously, people preferring to live in small settlements, some ruled by fear or menace, to protect themselves from marauding bandits. The players are armed with crossbows and Kirsten carries several knives at her belt, which she has learned to throw with deadly accuracy.
    The novel switches back and forth between the nail-biting future and a more decadent past, centred on our famous actor, introducing more characters who will somehow play a role in what transpires later on. One of these is Arthur's first wife, Miranda, who works for a shipping company, and spends her free hours creating a richly imagined alternative world called Station Eleven, in the form of intricately drawn graphic novels.
     Kirsten has a couple of copies, much read and dog-eared, to go with her small collection of memorabilia - the press cuttings featuring Leander, and the snow-globe she has carried in her backpack since that fateful night in Toronto. But she isn't the only one who harkens back to the past. The players find Shakespeare relevant to the new world they finds themselves in, and their motto: Survival is Insufficient, is a quotation from Star Trek.
    The story moves on in this zig-zag manner throwing up more connections between the characters as the orchestra, escaping from a cult leader and his team of thugs, converges on a disused airport. This is the home to one of the larger communities of survivors, and here Mandel has created a brilliantly atmospheric setting. It is good to know that if you find yourself in an airport when civilisation comes to an end, there is a lot of useful stuff on hand.
    Station Eleven is a wonderful book in which you can completely immerse yourself, combining the page-turning action of a survival story with complex characters and thoughts on nostalgia and celebrity culture. It is, not surprisingly, another of the novels I have read recently that have made the long-list of the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction - the short-list will be announced in a few days.

Wool by Hugh Howey

You have to be in the right mood for a distopian novel, but with the right kind of distopian novel, you know you'll be in for a ripping yarn that's hard to put down. Which was what I anticipated with Wool.
    The first of a trilogy, Wool describes a world that has destroyed itself, the air too toxic to breath, the earth a barren landscape blasted by caustic winds. Survivors live a passably normal existence, going to work or school, growing their food, making what they need to ensure their future, but living inside an enormous underground silo.
    Within the silo there are floors upon floors with a seemingly endless staircase, so people gravitate to a particular profession, living and working in a particular section of the silo. The Mechanics which maintain the silo's power supply live in the 'down deep', further above them are Supply, a kind of large warehousing unit. There are gardens, which connect people to a kind of religious veneration for the circle of life. Towards the 'up top' is IT, who have the technology to keep tabs on the workings of the silo as a whole.
    The story opens with the death by 'cleaning' of the silo's sheriff. Three years before, Holston's wife was sent out to clean and he has been distractedly morose ever since. There are flashbacks describing material his wife in IT has found on her computer - dangerous ideas that challenge the accepted way of thinking.
   'Cleaning'is a kind of exile from the silo, the condemned wearing a specially designed suit that will protect the wearer from the toxic air outside for a short time, just long enough to clean the sensors that project a view of the world to the silo inhabitants, and to walk a short distance towards a crumbling city beyond.
    Mayor Jahns watches with dismay Holston's cleaning, before turning her attention to appointing a new sheriff. She and Deputy Marnes make the long journey down to meet their top candidate, Juliette, a mechanic who had once helped Marnes on a murder case. Juliette is a terrific character - she's tough and can turn her mind to any problem to figure out a way to fix it. She is reluctant at first to accept the role of sheriff, and accepts only if she can do an overhaul of the silo's power generators first. She is, after all, a fixer.
   While she might be Jahns's top pick, Bernard, head of IT, is unconvinced. He has a curious grip on how things work in the silo and has his own man in mind. What happens next is a power struggle, involving murder, rebellion and a threat to continued life inside the silo. And Juliette will have her work cut out if she wants to fix that.
    This is a gripping story that lives up to its promise as a great distopian read rather like The Passage. It has drama and political intrigue in spades and sequences of thrilling action. Then there is the technology, described in depth, which makes the mechanical workings of the silo clearly imagined and fascinating.
    Like The Passage, Wool is the first of a trilogy and I will be keen to dip again into the world Hugh Howey has created - it is such a wonderful piece of invention.

White Horse by Alex Adams

I don't often read dystopian novels - they can be a bit grim - but they are often compelling. White Horse ticks both those boxes for sure. Set over two time periods, beginning eighteen months apart, the story chronicles events following the spread of a terrible virus. Its flu-like symptoms can kill very quickly, or alternatively they can alter human form, turning people into monsters.
    The story is narrated from the point of view of Zoe. Before the virus she's mentally fragile, unable to get her act together since the death of her husband several years before. She works as a janitor at a pharmaceutical laboratory in New York, mopping floors and cleaning out the cages of the lab mice. It is obvious there's some weird stuff  happening here. Those injections her boss, the remote George P Pope, gives her - are they really just flu shots?
    Things take a turn for the worse when a mysterious urn appears in Zoe's living room. Her handsome new therapist, Dr Rose, tells her to open the urn, but Zoe hesitates, imagining some kind of Pandora's box episode. After all, is it a coincidence that soon after the urn's arrival, people in her apartment block began to get sick?
    The storyline flips constantly between this first period (DATE: THEN) and those labelled DATE: NOW where Zoe is making a difficult journey by bicycle, through Italy, heading for Greece. All around her the world is a post-apocalyptic nightmare. There is very little fresh food, and towns and cities, where supplies still can be found, are beset with dangers - survivors willing to kill for any fresh meat.
    At times feeling ill herself, Zoe is aware that she might be succumbing to the virus, but still offers to rescue an English girl, Lisa, who is also frequently sick. As if things couldn't get any worse, they collect another fellow traveller, a nasty piece of work who is only ever named as the Swiss. He has an agenda that is only slowly revealed, and which can only mean harm to Zoe.
   The backwards and forwards plotting feeds out just enough information to allow the reader to gradually fill in the gaps, as well as making you eager to read the next chapter. The doom-laden storyline makes you fearful for Zoe, and it takes a lot of restraint not to flip to the back to check that she will be OK. As I said this is a very compelling story, a little reminiscent of Justin Cronin's Passage trilogy. As it turns out White Horse is also the first book of a trilogy but, feeling exhausted from the harrowing events of the first book, I am happy to take a breather before the next book appears.

The Twelve by Justin Cronin

Just so you know, I have never been a great fan of fantasy fiction. And I tend to steer clear of books about vampires – sorry, really not interested. But every so often along comes a book that you can't ignore.
   Justin Cronin's novel, The Passage, was a huge hit a couple of years ago. In case you've forgotten, The Passage is a dystopian story where North America is almost annihilated by a disease that came about when some scientists tried to breed a super-soldier, but instead turned a bunch of death-row inmates into hugely powerful vampires.
   I still wasn’t convinced it was a book for me, but suddenly, The Twelve was due to be published with glowing publicity, and I thought, oh help, I've some catching up to do. Then the characters were so engaging, the plot was riveting, and the world Cronin describes was so vivid, I couldn't put The Passage down. 
    And here I am, having just finished The Twelve - named for the very twelve vampires that evolved from that first fateful experiment. Most of the old gang is still there: Peter, now a soldier, is still driven to finish what he set out to do in the last book: see all of the twelve destroyed so that mankind can rebuild and live freely again. Comrade Alicia (Lish) is a fellow officer, while Amy – the girl who can save the world – is back in Kerrville, looking after children, including Peter’s nephew, at a convent. Michael the Circuit works as an oiler in Texas, and Sara is missing, presumed dead. The original crusade against the twelve seems to have hit a roadblock.
   Meanwhile at the city of Homeland, humans in the form of ‘red-eyes’ defy old age and manage to survive without the fortress set-up of other settlements, living a luxury existence at the expense of slaves captured from outlying areas. What is their secret? And what really goes on in the basement of a building known as the Dome?
   There is plenty to keep the reader avidly engrossed in The Twelve, which begins with a few back-stories from the first apocalypse. This gives the book both a compelling plot to keep things ticking along towards a grand showdown full of guns, explosions and dramatic tension, as well as providing a few more useful chunks in the trilogy jigsaw. Somehow in the next book we know there will be another nail-biting storyline, as well as a resolution that ties up all the loose-ends that have been left to maintain our curiosity.
   Indeed, The Twelve is a very satisfying read. What carries it beyond your standard apocalyptic adventure yarn is the surety that Cronin can craft a world that lives and breathes in our imagination. There are the wonderful descriptions of an America littered with ghost-towns and the detritus of a lost civilization (ours). The characters are complex and interesting. Even the not-very-nice ones do what they do because of reasons we can identify with. Guilder, the dictator running the show in Homeland starts out just trying to stay alive, but look at the devastation he wreaks. And let’s be honest, how can any of us know how we would behave in an extreme situation like this one?