This was my book club book last month, but I am very far behind on writing reviews, so it took me a while to get to it. It didn't help that I had a profoundly ambivalent reaction to the book - there were things about it I liked a lot, but there were also things that got on my nerves. So I don't know how to rate it - it's an interesting first novel, but boy, did some of it feel clunky.
I think a large part of my issues with the book came with expectations. When you have two very isolated people and you keep talking about the damn radios, then it is not unreasonable to expect that a good portion of the book will be said two isolated people talking to each other, finding connection through radio waves.
That is not what happened. Although Augustine, above the Arctic circle and all alone at a deserted polar base, keeps tabs on the ham radio air waves, and although Sully, with five others on their way back from a mission to Jupiter, keeps scanning the airwaves to find any sign of life on earth, it is not until around page 230 out of a 260-odd page book that the two actually connect. The author keeps teasing connection between drastically isolated people, but it doesn't come until the end, and when it does, the conversations are about mundane things. At least one of the two or three conversations they have is just summarized in a paragraph. That seemed like a lot of build-up for not a lot of payoff.
And then there was the part where one of my book habits made me more cross with this book than perhaps it deserved. I do often skip forward and skim the last couple of pages, and I did so in this case. In so doing, I found something that seemed like it was supposed to be a big "aha!" reveal, and it was not a good one, and it made me very angry. I carried that anger through most of the rest of the book, even though I realized that it was not so much of a sprung surprise as I had expected. What it revealed is made clear before that, although the last couple of pages try to put a topper on it that I still don't like, and the overall slow burn reveal is still not one I'm particularly fond of. Out of seven billion people in the world, seven can talk on the radio, and two of them are related? Really? There's straining credulity, then there's deus ex machina.
Of the two stories, I vastly preferred the astronauts, who lose contact with Earth as they return from a survey mission to Jupiter. (I'll get into the wider canvas in a minute.) Cut off from everyone, we have an interesting study of isolation in a small group, as they pull apart and pull together. We are mostly with Sully through this, a woman who became an astronaut by being detached from her family, in particular her daughter. We learn about her past that helped create her, although some of it is definitely choice as well.
And now we come to the part where this tries to be a post-apocalyptic book without ever committing one, or as my husband dubbed it, "Chekhov's Apocalypse." I don't need great detail, but I do need to feel like the author knows what's going on, has through this through thoroughly, and I was unconvinced. We know that there is no radio chatter coming from earth, not even anything automated. Except for where Augustine is. We know that it happened so fast NASA had no time to tell its astronauts anything, yet long enough that they came to evacuate everyone but Augustine from the polar base in airplanes. Maybe it was war. Maybe it was an electromagnetic pulse. Probably not a virus - there is nothing that would spread that fast that the astronauts weren't notified. And with the pulse, there was nothing shielded, anywhere on earth? No one who found a radio or constructed one that they could still use?
It comes down to this - to make Earth fall ENTIRELY silent, suddenly but not suddenly - if you set that up as your backdrop, you can't then ignore it as part of the story. There are lots of ways to tell stories of isolation that don't depend on the high concept, but if you have the high concept, you can't then spend the rest of the book retreating from it as fast as possible.
I get that this author wanted to write something literary (even if some of it is done ham-handedly). But Station Eleven is likewise literary post-apocalyptic fiction, and at every moment, I knew Emily St. John Mantel knew her apocalypse, had thought it through, and the implications. I don't get the same form Lily Brooks-Dalton.
And everyone knows, if you put an apocalypse on the mantel in the first act, it had better go off in the third. And it didn't.
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