A flu erases very nearly everyone in the space of a few weeks, and the thing Emily St. John Mandel chooses to write about is a Shakespeare troupe — because she understands that the question worth asking is not how we survive, but what could possibly make survival worth the trouble.
It opens with an actor, Arthur Leander, collapsing onstage in the middle of King Lear on the very night the Georgia Flu makes landfall — one private death held up against the threshold of a global one. Twenty years later a caravan of actors and musicians, the Traveling Symphony, walks the ruined shores of the Great Lakes performing Beethoven and the Bard for the scattered remnants of the world. Their creed, lettered across the lead wagon, is borrowed from a derelict starship:
Because survival is insufficient.
Mandel works in quiet coincidence rather than spectacle. A glass paperweight, a tabloid interview, a hand-drawn comic called Dr. Eleven pass from palm to palm across decades and catastrophes, stitching strangers together long after the world that first connected them is gone. There is a Museum of Civilization assembled in the concourse of an abandoned airport — cell phones and stiletto heels and credit cards laid out like the relics of a vanished faith — and it broke my heart more thoroughly than any of the novel's actual deaths.
It is, against all odds, a tender book. An elegy for everything we are currently failing to notice: the electric light, the orchestra, the ordinary miracle of a stranger's voice arriving down a telephone line.