Killing the Father: Station Eleven (Patrick Somerville, 2021)
The HBO adaptation of the popular novel is haunted by the relationships between parents and children, and the fraught legacies handed down from generation to generation.
[This piece discusses the plot and characters of Station Eleven, and is probably best read after you’ve seen the series.]
Like many people, I recently watched, and adored, Patrick Somerville’s television adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. I read the book some years ago but don’t recall it very well, aside from the memory of liking it and being stirred by it, of being impressed by Mandel’s feat of pulling off an apocalypse novel that feels not at all downbeat but, somehow, magical.
The show does something similar, which strikes me as extremely difficult—approaching a despairing subject matter with something like an air of wondrousness and even, occasionally, whimsy. Much of what will stick with me from the series are the show’s truly astonishing tonal shifts, from dread and horror to absurdity or comedy or joy: a stirring Braveheart-style speech that’s also funny as hell, a character rapping for his fellow survivors in a freezing apartment, a long sequence of babies being born that becomes both a celebration of life and a lamentation of death.
I was also struck by what the show added that was not much present in the novel—in particular, a host of themes surrounding parenthood and childhood, and growing up in hard times. These threads jumped out at me because they’re a major part of my forthcoming book. Growing up in apocalypse, the apocalypse in growing up—this is what fascinated me and provided the impetus for my novel. I’ve got a piece coming to Literary Hub soon that digs into the idea with a bit more depth, but to give a broad overview here…well, doesn’t growing up feel a bit like the world is ending sometimes? And aren’t today’s young generations growing up during what feels like the end of the world?
The Station Eleven series is particularly attuned to these themes, which it pursues through its portrayal of a number of parent and child pairings, fraught relationships between kids and caregivers. The main parent/child duo, at least to start, is Kirsten and Jeevan, two characters who were present at a Shakespeare play where an actor collapses onstage—in both book and series, the first narrative harbinger of pandemic. But in the book Kirsten and Jeevan scarcely interact; in the TV show Jeevan attempts to walk 8-year-old Kirsten home, and thus accidentally takes her on as a sort of adopted daughter for the duration of the pandemic to follow.
We meet Kirsten again on the other side of a pandemic that kills some 99% of the world’s population. In her late 20s, she’s now circling Lake Michigan with a troupe of Shakespearean actors called The Traveling Symphony. Played in this older iteration by Mackenzie Davis, Kirsten has both come out on the other side of her apocalyptic coming of age, and is still in the middle of the process of growing up. She’s an adult now, living fully in the After—but she also answers to older adults around her, and is still viewed as something of a kid among the grownups by aging leaders of the Symphony like the Conductor. Davis occasionally plays Kirsten, I believe deliberately, with a hint of a teenage whine in her voice, often complaining to the elder adults about their decisions. Kirsten is an adult, but a young adult, still negotiating with the elder generation for control of her world, and of the world.
At issue here, I think, is not just the experience of growing up in an age of global upheaval—pre-apocayptic childhood, post-apocalyptic adulthood—but also the relationship between generations in hard times. The fundamental dynamic as I see it is that if the world seems to be ending, it’s usually the older generation’s fault, yet it’s the younger generations who most stand to reap the consequences, to inherit the world that seems to be on the brink of collapse. Think of climate change, and someone like Greta Thunberg—don’t you hear a bit of adolescent rage in her voice? Well, there’s good reason for that: she’s a literal adolescent, 19 as of this writing. And there’s also good reason for her anger. We stand on a tipping point where global warming will be irreversible. Her generation stands to inherit an Earth that is different—worse—than the one that came before. And we, older generations, knew about it. Yet we did nothing.
In Station Eleven, the clearest representative of this anger at the grownups, the parents, is Tyler Leander—or the Prophet, as he comes to be known in the After. The son of Arthur Leander, the actor who collapses and dies in the show’s first scene. Tyler is a troubled boy—though it’s hard to say what he’s troubled by, there being so many options to choose from. His dad is dead, but he wasn’t so great when he was alive. His mom, he thinks, betrayed him by falling in league with his dad’s friend Clark as ethically compromised co-leaders of a survivor community holed up in a regional airport. Tyler’s apocalyptic childhood is a kaleidoscope of horrors, and the adults—his parents both biological and surrogate—are somehow to blame.
Whatever his reasons, Tyler runs off and becomes the Prophet, the leader of a cult of children obsessed with making war on the adult world. “There is no Before,” he says, a repeated phrase expressing his seeming belief that the adult world should be swept away to make room for the kids to inherit the Earth.
The phrase is a quote, though, and it comes from a graphic novel titled (drumroll!) Station Eleven. Kirsten is a reader of the graphic novel as well—though to call either characters mere readers probably understates the case. Both Tyler and Kirsten read the graphic novel obsessively during the pandemic, the text sustaining them through hard times and fundamentally forming their worldview in the After. Their relationship to Station Eleven is more akin to that of a religious text.
There’s been a lot of talk about the show’s portrayal of the importance of art in hard times, which is true and accurate, as far as it goes—but the easy thing to miss about this particular piece of art is that it is a legacy, an inheritance, from one generation to another, parent to child. It is the creation of Miranda, the former wife of Arthur Leander, and both Kirsten and Tyler come into possession of it due to their relationship with Arthur—a surrogate father for Kirsten, an absent father for Tyler. Whatever killing-the-father ethos Tyler or Kirsten have gleaned from the comic is undercut by the fact that the story was given to them by the previous generation, bequeathed to them by a literal father whose death neither can shake.
How contradictory our attitude toward our parents can be. I hate you. I miss you. Go away. Come back.
And it’s telling, too, that the Shakespeare plays most present in Station Eleven (the TV series, now) are King Lear and Hamlet, the texts most obsessed with parents and the messes they make for their kids, kids and their anger at their parents for screwing everything up—and for leaving them.
It’s the parent-child relationships in Station Eleven that are sticking with me most, days after I watched the last episode—probably because, at this point in my life, I feel like both a father and a son, and during a pandemic, no less. I am, on some level, still learning to make my way in this world, still learning to navigate its disasters, still looking to the generations ahead of mine and asking why, why didn’t you do something about this when you had the chance. But I’m also one of the grownups now, and a parent, shepherding two little kids through their own coming of age, their own succession of apocalypses. Watching the finale, I was ultimately the most gutted by my identification not with the kids, but with the parents—who were only doing their best, after all, and failing. Gutted by Jeevan and Kirsten, a surrogate father and daughter thrown together by chance in the face of unimaginable disaster. Walking through the woods. Then saying goodbye, and parting.
“Raising kids is hard,” Jeevan says to Kirsten—a confession, maybe an apology for all the mistakes he made taking care of her. “It’s like a yo-yo. You go in and out of sync. You love them, but you get angry. You scare them, they run away.”
“I was never scared with you,” Kirsten says.
“I was always scared,” Jeevan admits.
I was always scared. The line still stuns me with its devastating truth, its accuracy in describing pandemic parenting, and maybe parenting in general. I’m always scared.
It’s a hard thing for all of us, growing up and helping others grow up in hard times—which may be all times. We spend a lot of the time being afraid. We want to protect each other, but we can’t. We can’t shelter our loved ones forever. And so we let them slip through our fingers, hoping that what we’ve given them—our legacy, our love—will be enough to see them through.
Enough to guide them when our paths part and we must go our separate ways.
Folks, right now I’m in the throes of preparing for a book to come out—my new novel, The Temps, which comes out March 29. I’m thinking about it a lot, seeing elements of it and its themes everywhere I look. And hoping like hell that people will pre-order it.
If you liked Station Eleven—particularly the series—I really think you’ll like The Temps. It’s similarly attuned to the experience of living and growing up amidst intimations of apocalypse, scary and funny, entertaining but with a lot on its mind. I hope you’ll consider buying yourself a copy wherever you get your books.
Here are some pre-order links.
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