Week 56 Listicle

Reading for hope

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Every 7 weeks for the past year I’ve posted a list of things I’ve been reading and listening to (and occasionally watching). This month time has gotten the better of me, so I’ve cut the list to three.

1.    All City

I recently discovered this weekly newsletter by

Ciaran Thapar

, who gives an inside impression of UK youth culture in a time of austerity. As it says on the tin: “It’s like reading the diary of a youth worker in London, written with the pen of an author.” Highly recommended.

2.    Revolting Prostitutions: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights

A few weeks ago I posted that, after almost a decade focused on other things, I’ve put a couple of toes back into sex worker activism. I took a break, but the issue never went away. So I finally got around to reading this book by Junco Mac and Molly Smith. It’s an accessible read for anyone who wants the ins and outs of the argument for the decriminalisation of sex work, and demonstrates pretty definitively why sex work is as much about work as it is about sex.

3.    Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

Like millions of other people, I was drawn to the TV miniseries Station Eleven back in 2021 because of its eery resonance with the Coronavirus pandemic. I was engrossed by the show’s beautiful, slow rendition of a planet (well, in truth, a small corner of North America) where humanity had been reduced to a tiny fraction of its early twenty-first century population and thrown into a pre-digital and pre-fossil-fuel existence.

When a friend gifted me the book earlier this month, I expected the usual experience of finding the novel infinitely better than the series (a tall order). It’s actually a very different experience, but it’s worth every second of your reading time.

The book is missing many of the subplots and characters in the TV series, which, at eight and a half hours, is about four times longer than a film. At first I I missed key characters and relationships that had made the TV show particularly powerful. But as I read on, I appreciated the comparatively pared-down quality of the book, the bare bones as it were. St John Mandel was involved in writing the screenplay, so the TV show does capture the essence of her haunting prose. But it doesn’t reproduce the words of the anonymous observer of life after the collapse:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. … No more concert stages lit by candy-coloured halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars. … No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables, a dog bite. … No more countries, all borders abandoned. … No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room.

Or more alone, I think to myself as I read. We would each have our individualised list of regrets, as well as wishes, of the “no mores” of the after times.

There’s also plenty of time to consider what skills one may or may not bring to a pandemic-ravaged world. Performing Shakespeare and archiving the curious remnants of “civilisation” – smart phones with dark screens, stiletto heels, credit cards, rusting motorcycles – may give people a reason to live, but it’s the person who trained as a paramedic in the years before the flu struck, or who worked as a farmer, who keep them alive.

And while the moving picture images present the life of the travelling symphony and the people and places it passes along the way in magical detail, there are places modern television and movies refuse to go (a friend remarked years ago that the main lie of costume dramas is that no one has rotting teeth).  

There’s a captivating moment in the novel when the central character, Kirsten, enters an un-ransacked house for the first time in years. After leaving her companion to say his usual prayers for the skeletons in the beds (Why hadn’t the parents taken the boy into bed, if they’d all been sick together? Perhaps the parents had died first. She didn’t want to think about it), Kirsten walks into the ensuite bathroom, closes her eyes, flips the light switch and tries to remember lights flickering on, though she has almost no memories of the before time, having been eight years old when the old world ended almost overnight.

In the natural light she looks in the mirror, smiles, and adjusts her mouth “to lessen the obviousness of her most recently missing tooth”.

Station Eleven is a world where everyone is always conscious of what’s missing, where everyone is always grieving. Kirsten mourns her memory; the older people, who remember the old world well, grieve for it; those born after Year One lament having had no direct experience of the time before the disaster.

Forced to leave his brother’s Toronto apartment when their food runs out, Jeevan treads the shore of Lake Ontario in the deep snow in search of a new life; along the way he comes across a trio of other people fleeing the city, trying to stay warm in front of a fire:

“If you got sick,” Ben said, “you were gone in forty-eight hours.” He knew something about it. His girlfriend, his parents, and his two sisters had died in the first week. He couldn’t explain why he wasn’t dead too. He’d taken care of them, because by Day Three, all the hospitals had closed. He’d dug five graves in his backyard.

            “You must be immune,” Jeevan said.

            “Yes.” Ben stared fixedly into the flames. “I’m the luckiest man alive, aren’t I.”

History is filled with disasters that leave entire communities decimated. And then there are moments in an individual life where death comes so quickly and so close that it leaves you stunned and staggering around for meaning, moments when comfort comes from being in the company of others who are grieving.

Reading Station Eleven, a novel in which every word is meticulously chosen, every sentence and paragraph carefully crafted, in which everyone walks around in a state of shock and grief all the time, has been both profoundly moving, and a strange source of solace.

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to Pen in Fist for free here.