Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

Station Eleven (2014), by Emily St. John Mandel, is another in a seemingly endless onslaught of novels about the end of the world, the end of human civilization. However, this one doesn't involve zombies or vampires or an alien invasion. Instead it's about a disease called the Georgia Flu that comes into the US with passengers on a passenger plane from Russia. Within hours all the people on the plane are showing symptoms of the disease and by the next day they’re dead. The disease quickly spreads across Canada and the United States and the rest of the world. The mortality rate is 99%. The author doesn't dwell on the symptoms of the disease or the suffering of the people who die from it. Instead it reviews events leading up to the outbreak over a 20-year period, and then events leading away from it over the next 20-year period. The central character is a man named Arthur Leander, a prominent actor who at the beginning of the novel is portraying the lead role in an innovative production of Shakespeare's King Lear in Toronto. Midway through the performance he suffers a heart attack and dies. The course of his career from his early days as a college student to the days of his middle life where he's a great success and is highly respected and is pursued by paparazzi provides a motif around which the novel is built. Various people who come in touch with Leander or who know of him in some way are central characters in the novel.

The title refers to a graphic novel written by Arthur's first wife Miranda. She doesn't write it for publication. She writes and illustrates it for personal satisfaction. It has an intricate plot and is beautifully illustrated.  Some events in her novel run parallel to events in Miranda's life, including her relatively short marriage to Arthur. Various characters read or are influenced by her novel in various ways.

Stations Eleven focuses on the Collapse, which means the collapse of civilization in the months immediately following the outbreak of the flu. Within two weeks virtually everybody is dead, except for the 1% who through various means (genetics or luck) survive. The novel is not maudlin. It doesn't dwell on the grotesque or violent.  Its tone is elegiac, especially when older characters tell younger ones about what it was like to live in a time when there was the Internet and electricity and cars and airplanes and technology. It reminded me of the 1950s novel On the Beach, by Neville Shute, and the film based on it.

King Lear and Shakespeare's plays provide a running motif. In the years following the Collapse a group of performers, musicians, and actors and others band together as the Traveling Symphony and trek through Michigan and Canada performing Shakespeare's plays and music by composers such as Beethoven and Bach. They're the only entertainment, the only access to any kind of art or culture, which anyone left in these parts of the world has access to.

A man named Clark, who was close friends with Arthur early in their lives, gets stuck at an airport in the upper Midwest and lives the rest of his life there with about 300 other people. He collects artifacts from the world before the Collapse and starts a Museum of Civilization whose collection includes cell phones and iPads and computers and other relics of the former world. The museum’s existence is important. People visit it. Clark interviews all the members of the Traveling Symphony including a young woman named Kristin, who coincidentally had a small part in the play King Lear that Arthur Leander starred in. She was on stage standing behind Leander the night he suffered his heart attack. He gives her a copy of the graphic novel “Station 11” which his wife had given to him, and she carries it with her everywhere she goes for the rest of her life. This novel is depressing, yes. But in its own way it’s hopeful. It suggests that should a terrible calamity occur that wipes out human civilization the few who remain, the few who survive, if there are a few, will value enough what they have lost enough that they will seek to keep it alive--for its own value, for posterity’s sake, for the benefit of those who otherwise would never be able to appreciate a symphony or a tragedy by Shakespeare.

This is a beautifully written novel, ingeniously plotted, full of interesting characters, a deep meditation on how quickly we might lose everything we have achieved.

Arrival

Arrival (2016; dir. Denis Villeneuve) is a film of great emotional intelligence. Aspects of the film may require some suspension of disbelief, or at least a willingness to give oneself up to the logic and the imagination of the story. I expect good science fiction to stick within the realm of science, of scientific possibility, however much the writer may want to push and extend those barriers. The viewer of a science fiction film should apply a similar standard. Science fiction writers and filmmakers can't simply make things up.   When they speculate, they must do so within the boundaries of what is scientifically plausible.  Arrival honors these boundaries. (Much so-called science fiction should be more properly termed fantasy because it doesn’t work within these boundaries).

As I said, Arrival is an emotionally intelligent film. It's an intelligent film in general. Not to say necessarily that it's a great film, but that it is, given all the instances of cinematic science fiction out there these days (especially superhero films), a good film: partially because of the intelligence--you don't see intelligence in most films; partly also because of the acting – Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker are excellent in their roles.  Because Arrival is a film about the sudden appearance on earth of twelve alien spaceships, special effects are necessary, but the film doesn't over-rely on them.

Arrival interweaves different motifs and issues and plot lines: it's about a so-called alien invasion; it's about a linguist attempting to decipher and communicate in an alien language; it's about a mother grieving over the death of her child, and dealing as well with the failure of her marriage; it’s about how the arrival of alien life might affect domestic and international relations. And it's a love story. The movie doesn't stress the love story until the end. The love plot involves what I would regard as the worst line in the film. I'll leave it to readers to identify that line. Arrival is also about time, about a theory of time.

There is considerable expository infrastructure in the film. By that I mean we expend a lot of time watching the military gather its forces and send troops and tanks and tents and other military materiel to the location of the alien spaceship that has landed in Montana. Do all such alien arrivals necessarily result in the mustering of military forces? It's not necessarily pertinent to the film how the military conducts itself. Even if the military needs to be on the scene, we don't need to watch for multiple minutes how it gets there. In a larger sense the military is pertinent because tensions are rising in the nations where twelve of the spaceships have landed, and as the film progresses those nations are moving towards going to war with the aliens and with each other. But this is not a film about the military. Let me be clear: I don't fault the military. It must do what it must do. Its role is over emphasized in Arrival, however, to the detriment of plot and character development.

Arrival alludes in a subtle way to contemporary American politics and the distrust of some elements of the American population in the American government. This leads to a mutiny of sorts by some soldiers, which is deftly integrated into the structure of the film.

The two most important plot lines are interwoven: one line is the struggle of Louise (Amy Adams) to grieve for and come to grips with the death of her teenaged daughter by cancer. The other is her efforts to decipher the alien language. Part of the intelligence and uniqueness of the film is how it makes a linguist the main character and central interest. Louise's partner in the efforts to interpret the alien language is an astrophysicist, played by Jeremy Renner; he regards what he does as science and what she does as something else. He is impressed to discover that linguistics at least from one point of view is a mathematical discipline. As the linguist, Amy Adams brings, in contrast to the authority of the military and scientific logic of Renner’s character, human emotions. She has the empathy and intelligence to recognize that language is more than simply a matter of words. It involves the need for physical presence--the need for individuals to be able to touch each other in some physical or at least emotional way. The film suggests that language is more than simply an ability to communicate.

Arrival works on the premise that language is a way of thinking with a direct physical effect on the brain. When one learns to speak another language in the deepest possible way, he or she learns to think in that language. When Louise learns to communicate in the alien language, she also learns to think like the aliens. Because their language and their way of thinking involves a non-linear concept of time, there are specific consequences in the plot of the film

The narrative to an extent moves back and forth in time, primarily from scenes involving Louise and her daughter (many of which she is remembering) and scenes in the present time. Louise's memories of her daughter play a role in her developing ability to decipher the alien language. As she advances in her ability to speak that language, she begins to think of time in nonlinear ways, which again has an impact on the plot.

Arrival may offer occasional difficulties in understanding what is going on, but maybe those difficulties are part of its point. Because it is so well-made and the acting is so effective, because of its emotional intelligence, the film justifies the willing suspension of disbelief that its plot requires.

Minor caveats: the physical appearance of the aliens--viewers can make their own decision about this point--and the amount of time it takes Louise to decipher the alien language--it's a nonhuman language, but she's communicating on a basic level in less than six weeks. These are quibbles.

Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman

In Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) a character named Richard Mayhew has made the mistake of interacting too closely with inhabitants of the “Under-World” of London.  He begins to fade out of his life.  He has difficulty getting people to notice him.  His landlord rents out his apartment and gives away his belongings.  His employer replaces him.  People on the street don’t notice him until he stands directly in front of them, and then they’re only hazily aware of his presence.  Ultimately, they don’t see him at all.  Even though Mayhew’s awareness of himself hasn’t changed, he has faded out of the world and ceased to exist there, at least insofar as anyone in that world is aware.  This is Neil Gaiman as Kafka.  It reminded me of “The Hunger Artist” and “The Metamorphosis.”  Gaiman handles this change deftly.  It’s terrifying because he presents it as something not at all terrifying but rather as almost commonplace.  It’s terrifying to Mayhew only when he recognizes that the transformation has taken place, that he’s lost his life and his world, and that there’s nothing to be done about it.  The terrifying reality of this transformation is that it happens to the elderly, the marginalized, the disabled all the time.

One of the admirable qualities of this adult fantasy (adult in the sense of “for mature and intelligent readers”) is that scenes and situations we would normally regard as fantastic are presented as credible.  One such moment comes when Mayhew attracts the attention of a beautiful woman whom he has been warned is a Lamia—she sucks the life out of her victims, like a vampire, leaving them cold and almost lifeless. In another he converses with a roomful of rats.  In still another a terrifying creature with tentacles reaches out of the gap between a subway train and the platform and tries to drag Mayhew away—this, we’re told, is the reason for “Mind the Gap” signs.

Although there is humor in this novel, its tone is basically serious.  It shows us what happens to a conventional man trapped in an underworld of fantastic people and events.  His whole life, and his conception of himself, changes fundamentally. Gaiman is such an accomplished writer that he handles the various events and characters in Neverwhere as if they might be scenes and characters from novels by Forster or James or Cheever.  In fact, the hero of this novel is much like a character from a Cheever story, such as “The Country Husband” or “The Swimmer.” Coupled with his abilities as a creator of narrative, Gaiman’s inventive and fertile imagination enables him to concoct elaborate fantasies that have the best qualities of great literature.

Sausage Party

I gave up on Sausage Party (2016; co-dir. Greg Tiernan, Conrad Vernon) after 20 minutes. There is a certain novelty in hearing grocery store produce—hotdogs, apples, potatoes, carrots--call each other mother fuckers. It's even more novel when a hot dog and a hotdog bun talk about the prospect of having sex for the first time when they arrive in the “Great Beyond.” But after a while, even with a hot dog, the joke gets old. Although the comedy in this film works mainly on a level that would appeal to 14-year-olds, there is an adult dimension. All the grocery store items long for that moment when someone from the outside world will arrive and put them into a grocery basket and take them out the wide glass front doors of the store to the Great Beyond. The Great Beyond is the afterlife, the hereafter, paradise, Shangri-La, heaven. When a customer accidentally spills groceries out of her cart and has to return a damaged item, one of the returned items--a douche kit-- reveals that the Great Beyond is not heaven but instead death and oblivion. Understandably, this revelation prompts existential angst amongst the vegetables, condiments, and other household products.

Isn't this the notion we’re all living with, that we've been living with all of our lives? We may already believe that the Great Beyond is nothing but oblivion. If we don't believe that, if we believe in heaven, or some other afterlife, don't we also live with the shadow of a suspicion or even more than a shadow that after it's all over with there's nothing but--nothing?

It's easier to contemplate this dark prospect in human terms than in terms of broccoli and carrots.

This film’s philosophical dimension did not compensate for the diminishing novelty of bananas and bottles of ketchup calling each other mother fuckers.

Fantastic Planet

In 1972 Fantastic Planet (dir. René Laloux) was an unusual and significant step forward in the development of animated films. It uses muted pastel colors, a limited palette, and stylized, childlike illustrations to portray its characters. The film is about a planet where alien creatures with blue skin and big eyes keep humans as pets. They don’t regard humans as anything more than curiosities, as animals, and they periodically conduct exterminations to reduce the numbers of humans, whom they regard as pests. The humans who are not kept as pets live in settlements outside the alien city and try to escape notice.

It's easy enough to see the potential for allegory here: we can think of our pets, or of the livestock we raise for food. We can think also of race or nationality and how one national or racial group might tend to regard other groups as inferior.

In 2016 this film is more a historical curiosity than anything else. It is slow, and we spend a lot of time watching the humans walking from one place to the other or the aliens doing whatever it is that they do (they meditate a lot, and this is connected to their process of reproduction). This film was made during the age of psychedelia, and certain elements remind me of the Peter Max-style of animation in the film Yellow Submarine (1968; dir. George Dunning), made a few years earlier. There are many scenes of bizarre and fantastic creatures that are imaginatively and amusingly depicted, but which have no pertinence to the central plot.  The film argues that if we could all settle our differences and live together peacefully, everyone would benefit.  Oh that it were so simple.

In the Woods, by Tana French

The virtues of In the Woods (2007), the first novel by Tana French, are many: an intricate plot, compelling narrator, a lush and descriptive prose, narrative momentum and tension, convincing knowledge of the inner workings of law enforcement in Ireland, and so on. The narrator Rob is a detective on the murder squad of the Dublin Police Department. Some 15 years before the present time of the novel, he was one of three children who were victims of a crime in the woods near his hometown. He remembers little of the event, but he was discovered clinging to a tree covered in blood that wasn't his. His two friends, a boy and a girl, were never seen again. The murder that is the focus of this novel involves a 12-year-old girl whose body is discovered on top of a sacrificial altar in the middle of an archaeological dig in the same town where the narrator grew up and where his friends were abducted. With the discovery of the body, both the narrator and the reader begin to wonder whether there is a connection between the crimes.

What Tana French does well in this novel is build a sense of the narrator’s personal history: his past life, his time in a private school where his parents sent him for safety and privacy after the disappearance of his friends, his loss of his Irish accent, and so on. Our narrator is a prime example of an unreliable narrator. He confesses early on that he tells lies, that lies are a part of his job as a detective trying to discover who committed a particular murder: he must, he says, tell lies to get suspects to give up information. It's not until the end that we discover how truly significant his admission is. This unreliable narrator turns out to be an unreliable police detective whose mistakes, incompetence, self-centeredness, and inability to assess his connection to the case result in a psychopath’s being allowed to go free. Having said all this, I haven’t given much away.

I was unhappy when this novel ended because of the narrator's responsibility for botching both the case and his relationship with his partner, and because of the many dimensions of his dishonesty in his interactions with his friends and colleagues. But perhaps that's all a part of the novel’s realism, which colors the action in shades of blame and virtue and evil. There are no sharp dividing lines between the good and the bad, the incompetent and the able.

We have here what I call a diminishing narrator, whose credibility and trustworthiness gradually crumble as the novel progresses. By the end he is pitiable and unlikable. He reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender is the Night: Dick Diver enters the narrative as an entirely admirable person but by the final chapter he is a moral and physical wreck.

Among the problems I have with this novel: the characterizations of the main detective and narrator Rob and his partner Cassie. The ways they talk and joke and banter and pretend to flirt with each other struck me as unrealistic and unbelievable: a total contrivance, an invention, a ruse, an artifice. Sometimes my skin almost cringed when they joked with each other. I wasn't convinced. Some of the secondary characters are more realistically drawn.

This was a first novel, and perhaps as a result there are occasional missteps. I don't read many murder mysteries: this one was certainly above the average quality of the ones I have read. But it seemed odd to me in this novel where the murder takes place in the middle of an archaeological dig and the detectives determine that the victim was not killed where her body was found but instead was killed somewhere nearby that there's not an immediate search of the buildings on the site of the dig: there are two sheds. The detectives don't get around to searching those sheds until late in the novel. This seemed unlikely.