End of the world, but it’s not all Bard for Emily St John Mandel

Not much survives in the post-apocalyptic world of Emily St John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, but Shakespeare does.

Sydney Writers Festival

Not much survives in the post-apocalyptic world of Emily St John Mandel’s novel Station Eleven, but Shakespeare does.

Set in a US devastated by a flu pandemic, the novel features a group of travelling actors and ­musicians who perform Shakespeare’s plays to the survivors who subsist in makeshift, almost primitive, communities.

“When I was working on the book, my husband made a comment about what would people mourn, and I thought it would be what was best about the world,’’ the Canadian author, visiting Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival, said yesterday.

“That idea guided a lot of my decisions. In earlier drafts I had the company performing everything from Shakespeare to David Mamet to Seinfeld, which was ­interesting but started to seem a little incongruous.

“I decided audiences would not be interested in works that were a product of the modern world that had collapsed, so I restricted the repertoire to the times before electricity, and then just to Shakespeare.

“The more I read Shakespeare, the more I was attracted to some parallels. His audiences, in Elizabethan England, would have been haunted by memories of pandemics in the recent past.’’

Station Eleven is a novel in which the end of the world is not necessarily the end of the world. The main story of the touring ­actors unfolds 20 years after the catastrophe, and while there is still no electricity or running water, there are signs of civilisation. It is not as bleak as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or TV’s The Walking Dead.

“Most post-apocalyptic novels and films tend to be set in the ­aftermath of disaster, a period of chaos and mayhem and bloodshed,’’ Mandel said. “While such a period would occur, it’s not a sustainable way of life over gen­erations and I think there’d be a movement towards some kind of normality, some kind of peace.’’

Mandel, 35, whose previous novels were literary crime fiction, said she saw a dystopian novel as a way of writing about the modern world.

“There is this incredible apparatuses of technology that surrounds us — electricity, water, cell phones, computers, aeroplanes — and it occurred to me that an ­interesting way to write about those things would be to write about their absence.’’

Not all of the lost technology might be missed. In reading the novel, there’s a sense of liberation at the demise of social media. “I’d be very much in favour of those losses,’’ Mandel says with a laugh. “It sounds wonderful to me.’’

In Mandel’s novel, the civilisation-ending flu is spread by air travel. Coincidentally, her visit to Australia was preceded by a local biohazard scare: the illegal entry of Johnny Depp’s dogs Pistol and Boo, who have since returned home.

“Yes, it’s a fascinating glimpse of why Australia is so stringent,’’ she said. “You never know what can come in.’’