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Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826. Its first person narrative tells the story of our world standing at the end of the twenty-first century and - after the devastating effects of a plague - at the end of humanity. In the book Shelley writes of weaving this story from a discovery of prophetic writings uncovered in a cave near Naples. The Last Man was made into a 2008 film.
It took me some while to get into ‘The Last Man’, both because of its slow start and my present preoccupation with moving house. The style throughout is extremely florid and capital-R Romantic, as you would expect from Mary Shelley. To set the scene prior to the apocalypse, however, the narrator describes in minute detail how noble, beautiful, and wonderful his friends, wife, and children are. This dominates the first 70 or so pages. There follows a war between the Greeks and Turks, concurrent with some emotional melodrama, which advances us to around page 175. Thereafter the novel really gets into its stride, because from then on the main character is Death. Mary Shelley devotes reams of voluptuous, epic description to a plague that over years wipes out the human race. She summons gorgeous metaphors and heights of emotion to convey the horror of events. Moreover, she anticipates the current fascination with post-apocalyptic ruins by repeatedly describing cities denuded of human life; London’s streets are often said to be covered in long grass, for instance.
I quite liked this book just as a novel, but it is really most interesting as a very early example of the post-apocalyptic genre that now has such great popularity. I also found it curious to contemplate Shelley’s ideas of how the UK would be in the 2080s. She thought that there would still be a quasi-feudal aristocracy, but that England would be a republic with a ‘Protector’ (title presumably borrowed from Cromwell). Somewhat sadly considering that Mary Wollstonecraft was her mother, the female characters in this book don’t get much involved in politics and are generally to be found fainting and looking after their children. Perdita and Evadne have more complex lives than just caring for others, but both are very unhappy.
Ultimately, though, the strength of the book lies not with the characters, who are largely props to contextualise the overwhelming disaster of the plague. When Shelley was writing, there was no expectation that a new plague would be cured by scientists working feverishly; in her vision of the 2080s no-one even knows how it spreads. As a meditation on death, at the individual, group, and species level, ‘The Last Man’ is powerful and in places frightening. The inevitability of humanity’s end reminded me of the much later novel [b:On the Beach|38180|On the Beach|Nevil Shute|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg|963772] by Nevil Shute. Many passages in it demand to be declaimed and the dialogue feels akin to that of a play. For example:
“Hear, O ye inhabitants of the earth,” he cried, “hear thou, all seeing, but most pitiless Heaven! Hear thou too, O tempest-tossed heart, which breathes out these words, yet faints beneath their meaning! Death is among us! The earth is beautiful and flower-bedecked, but she is our grave! The cloud of heaven weep for us - the pageantry of the stars is but our funeral torchlight.”
If you enjoy language of that nature, you will like this novel. I am not surprised to learn that it was the first that she wrote after Percy Shelley’s death. And as ever, I advise you to read the introduction last. One notable comment in it is that the novel was badly reviewed when first published. It was rather before its time. ( )
Finally managed to get my hands on this book after having wanted to read it for years - a pioneer of the post-apocalyptic genre. Set in the late 21st century, the novel follows Lionel Verney from his early childhood as a rural shepherd, as he gets involved in the politics of now-republican England, makes friends, marries, fights in a war, and finally faces humanity's doom at the hands of a plague. I found it was easier to approach this book as an alternative past than a possible future, since my imagination couldn't quite handle the very antiquated future presented here. Writing in the 1820s, Mary Shelley could not have anticipated that the people of 2097 would not likely be fighting wars on horseback, travelling by carriage or having to gather tools to "make a light" upon entering a room. The narrative was also very heavy on exposition, with lots of angsty internal monologue by Lionel in place of action. Lionel's lonely fate is a very affecting one, and so it should be, as Mary Shelley was writing from her own feelings of loss after losing her husband and child. Despite being a lesser known work of hers, it was still a very solid read. ( )
I can see why this never had the success Frankenstein did. Very slow and melodramatic. The first part has no mention of the coming plague. I found it very hard to keep my interest in the story. ( )
3.5 Stars. forget about the fact that this is supposedly taking place in the last part of the 21st Century. everything seems to be the same as it was in the time of the author's writing, which is the beginning of the 1800s. The only evidence of the setting being in the future is when Lionel was coming back from Greece after Raymond and Perdita died, and was going on a type of airplane that had a dome over the top of it. There's no evidence that there's any kind of gender equality. And Eton, the school in England, is still around. It's still only for boys. England still has colonies: New Holland, Van Diemen's land and the Cape of Good Hope. 🙄 If you can get to part 3 of this book, I hope you will love it as much as I did. The whole book is so beautifully written, but it's so wordy, and so tedious with every detail of the lives of the characters. Moreover, some of the characters are so dramatic that you just want to shake them and say "be happy for what you have, dammit!" But when you get to part 3, when there's a very small remnant left of mankind and the plague has taken nearly all of humans, you start to realize, even if you're a confirmed misanthropist like I am, that the end of man will have some sadness attached to it. This is weird to talk about, because Trump and his big boys are trying to finish us humans, our fellow fauna, and this Earth as fast as they can, by changing the climate, and I don't think it will be long before we will be Trumped by what we've done to unbalance the ecology. And I always say to myself, "humans don't deserve to live, especially on this beautiful planet, because we are capable of such vile deeds, such cruelty to creatures who depend on us for succour." And Yet, a few of us are also capable of incredible kindness, and caring, and reaching out to comfort our fellows when they are so downtrodden by this life. I found myself feeling a little sad, as the last man came to be by himself. The author put so much love and work into every page that it's just incredible to think of the amount of talent she had. This is my first book by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. ( )
Let no man seek Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall Him or his children. -Milton
Dedication
Di mie tenere frondi altro lavoro Credea mostrarte; e qual fero pianeta Ne' nvidiò insieme, o mio nobil tesoro?
Text from the author's introduction. Notes from the Wordsworth Classics 2004 edition state that 'The choice of quotation at once laments the loss of Percy Bysshe Shelley and dedicates the text to him. And identifies it as sonnet 322, Petrarch's Lyric Poems translated and edited as follows by R. M. Durling, Harvard University Press, 1976
I thought to show you some other work of my young leaves; and what cruel planet was displeased to see us together, O my noble treasure?
TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS DEAD. SHADOWS, ARISE, AND READ YOUR FALL! BEHOLD THE HISTORY OF THE LAST MAN
Lionel Verney narrator / fictional author From the last pages of the book.
First words
I visited Naples in the year 1818.
Quotations
Life is not the thing romance writers describe it; going through the measures of a dance, and after various evolutions arriving at a conclusion, when the dancers may sit down and repose. While there is life there is action and change. We go on, each thought linked to the one which was its parent, each act to a previous act. No joy or sorrow dies barren of progeny, which for ever generated and generating, weaves the chain that make our life.
One word, in truth, had alarmed her more than battles or sieges, during which she trusted Raymond's high command would exempt him from danger, that word, as yet it was not more o her, was "plague." This enemy to the human race had begun early in June to raise its serpent head on he shores of the Nile; parts of Asia, not usually subject to this evil, were infected. It was in Constantinople; but as each year that City experienced a like visitation, small attention was paid to those accounts which declared more people to have died there already, than usually made up the accustomed prey of the whole of the hotter months.
Let us live for each other and for happiness, let us seek peace in our dear home...let us leave"life" that we may "live."
Ye are all going to die, I thought, already your tomb is built up around you. Awhile because you are gifted with agility and strength, you fancy that you live: but frail is the "bower of flesh" that encaskets life; dissoluble the silver cord that binds you to it. The joyous soul charioted from pleasure to pleasure by the graceful mechanism of well-formed limbs, will suddenly feel the axle-tree give way and spring and wheel dissolve in dust. Not one of you, O fated crowd, can escape - not one!
Thousands die unlamented; for beside the yet warm corpses the mourner was stretched, made mute by death.
We first had bid adieu to the state of things, which having existed many thousand years seemed eternal; such a state of government, obedience, traffic and domestic intercourse, as had moulded our hearts and capacities, as far back as memory could reach. Then to patriotic zeal, to the arts, to reputation, to enduring fame, to the name of country, we had bidden farewell. We saw depart all hope of retrieving our ancient state - all expectation, except the feeble one of saving our individual lives from the wreck of the past.
Verney, the last of the race of Englishmen, had taken up his abode in Rome...Friend, come! I wait for thee!
The spirit of life seemed to linger in his form, as a dying flame on an altar flickers on the embers of an accepted sacrifice.
To our right the Acropolis rose high, spectatress of a thousand changes, of ancient glory, Turkish slavery, and the restoration of dear-bought liberty; tombs and cenotaphs were strewed thick around, adorned by ever renewing vegetation; the mighty dead hovered over their monuments, and beheld in our enthusiasm and congregated numbers a renewal of the scenes in which they had been actors.
"You clothe your meaning, Perdita," I replied, "in powerful words, yet that meaning is selfish and unworthy of you. You have often agreed with me that there is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others: and now, in the very prime of life, you desert your principles, and shut yourself up in useless solitude."
But in this mortal life extremes are always matched; the thorn grows with the rose, the poison tree and the cinnamon mingle their boughs.
Such is human nature, that beauty and deformity are often closely linked. In reading history we are chiefly struck by the generosity and self-devotion that follow close on the heels of crime, veiling with supernal flowers the stain of blood. Such acts were not wanting to adorn the grim train that waited on the progress of the plague.
We feared the balmy air--we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb, and the fragrant land smelled to the apprehension of fear like a wide church-yard.
It is a part of man's nature to adapt itself through habit even to pain and sorrow. Pestilence had become a part of our future, our existence; it was to be guarded against, like the flooding of rivers, the encroachments of ocean, or the inclemency of the sky. After long suffering and bitter experience, some panacea might be discovered; as it was, all that received infection died--all however were not infected; and it became our part to fix deep the foundations, and raise high the barrier between contagion and the sane; to introduce such order as would conduce to the well-being of the survivors, and as would preserve hope and some portion of happiness to those who were spectators of the still renewed tragedy.
The painted birds flitted through the shades; the careless deer reposed unhurt upon the fern--the oxen and the horses strayed from their unguarded stables, and grazed among the wheat, for death fell on man alone.
Hope, she said, was better than a doctor's prescription, and every thing that could sustain and enliven the spirits, or more worth than drugs and mixtures.
Whoever labours for man must often find ingratitude, watered by vice and folly, spring from the grain which he has sown.
Sheath your weapons; these are your brothers, commit not fratricide; soon the plague will not leave one for you to glut your revenge upon: will you be more pitiless than pestilence?
Were we not happy in this paradisaical retreat? If some kind spirit had whispered forgetfulness to us, methinks we should have been happy here, where the precipitous mountains, nearly pathless, shut from our view that far fields of desolate earth, and with small exertion of the imagination, we might fancy that the cities were still resonant with popular hum, and the peasant still guided his plough through the furrow, and that we, the world's free denizens, enjoyed a voluntary exile, and not a remediless cutting off from our extinct species.
Alas! why must I record the hapless delusion of this matchless specimen of humanity? What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery? We are not formed for enjoyment; and, however we may be attuned to the reception of pleasureable emotion, disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us on to the shoals.
We were as a man who hears that his house is burning, and yet hurries through the streets, borne along by a lurking hope of a mistake, till he turns the corner, and sees his sheltering roof enveloped in a flame. Before it had been a rumor; but now in words uneraseable, in definite and undeniable print, the knowledge went forth. Its obscurity of situation rendered it the more conspicuous: the diminutive letters grew gigantic to the bewildered eye of fear: they seemed graven with a pen of iron, impressed by fire woven in the clouds, stamped on the very front of the universe.
Last words
Thus around the shores of deserted earth, while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney--the LAST MAN.
Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote the apocalyptic novel The Last Man in 1826. Its first person narrative tells the story of our world standing at the end of the twenty-first century and - after the devastating effects of a plague - at the end of humanity. In the book Shelley writes of weaving this story from a discovery of prophetic writings uncovered in a cave near Naples. The Last Man was made into a 2008 film.
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I quite liked this book just as a novel, but it is really most interesting as a very early example of the post-apocalyptic genre that now has such great popularity. I also found it curious to contemplate Shelley’s ideas of how the UK would be in the 2080s. She thought that there would still be a quasi-feudal aristocracy, but that England would be a republic with a ‘Protector’ (title presumably borrowed from Cromwell). Somewhat sadly considering that Mary Wollstonecraft was her mother, the female characters in this book don’t get much involved in politics and are generally to be found fainting and looking after their children. Perdita and Evadne have more complex lives than just caring for others, but both are very unhappy.
Ultimately, though, the strength of the book lies not with the characters, who are largely props to contextualise the overwhelming disaster of the plague. When Shelley was writing, there was no expectation that a new plague would be cured by scientists working feverishly; in her vision of the 2080s no-one even knows how it spreads. As a meditation on death, at the individual, group, and species level, ‘The Last Man’ is powerful and in places frightening. The inevitability of humanity’s end reminded me of the much later novel [b:On the Beach|38180|On the Beach|Nevil Shute|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327943327s/38180.jpg|963772] by Nevil Shute. Many passages in it demand to be declaimed and the dialogue feels akin to that of a play. For example:
If you enjoy language of that nature, you will like this novel. I am not surprised to learn that it was the first that she wrote after Percy Shelley’s death. And as ever, I advise you to read the introduction last. One notable comment in it is that the novel was badly reviewed when first published. It was rather before its time. (