“Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. The arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.”
The author explores the pandemic experience in this time-traveling narrative akin to her fourth novel Station Eleven. However, unlike the previous novel, this narrative was conceived after the world had undergone a recent pandemic expanding on the motif. Mandel incorporates the Covid 19 pandemic in the storyline that takes place in 2020. Moreover jumps in time to 2203 when a global pandemic named Sars Twelve breaks out in the world. In the first story, the author sets it at the onset of the Great War which puts the statement into perspective following the next stories. The real-life pandemic that saw the whole world under lockdown in a couple of months was disorienting and sudden. Similarly, the characters in the year 2203 are in the middle of the worst outbreak that is crippling their movement and threatening more lives.
“The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.”
In the future, humanity dwells both on Earth and in colonies that are in outer space to mitigate the rising human population. Olive lives on Colony Two which is a significant distance from her childhood hometown on Earth where her parents still reside. The idea of distance in the statement is both a figurative and literal one in explaining the human connection or lack thereof. The overpopulation and disease outbreaks in the narrative have forced humans to separate themselves from each other. Therefore, the sense of isolation and physical distance looms over a majority of the population in this reality. The novel explores the concept of moving away from your roots and losing that connection with the place.
“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”
The narrative is composed of interconnected stories across multiple timelines that find humans in a particular predicament. Every generation has its challenges that they have had to overcome including either war, disease, famine, or economic downfall. Therefore, the sense of self-importance is part of this journey as each views their predicament as the potential end of the world. In the first narrative, the characters are about to be in a devastating war followed by a flu pandemic. As such, the initial impulse is that this is the worst that it will ever get and humanity will probably not survive. The sense of doom is observed throughout the novel as humanity goes through more pandemics, overpopulation, and existential threats.
