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. ( )

Overly florid and filigreed with no true engagement with any of the important issues embedded in her scenario. ( )

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. ( )

Holy fucking fuck, I can't believe I finally read this whole fucking book. ( )

A very difficult read. The writing is incredibly superfluous. The first 2/3 of the book is about the personal lives of the main characters and english society, supposedly in the lat 21st century. However, its as if society remained unchanged in every aspect between the early 1800s and the late 2100s.

The final 1/3 of the book is much better. The language is still difficult, but the story encapsulates far more interesting issue and themes that make it worth the effort. ( )

The subject of this book is interesting--an early last man on earth story, but it is slow and tedious reading. ( )

"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."

Well that was a LOT... i mean the first 150-200 pages could have been cut without much loss and even when it gets to the main event so to speak, there are several sidestories which while they add a little tend to slow things down even more.
Having said that, the overall feeling of length did actualy contribute to the slow beat down of the characters in an effective way.
The style is a bit lyrical and stagey, for want of a better term a lot of stage-like speeches declaiming against the heavens sort of thing.

I vacillated as to whether to give this 3 or 4 stars but overall its worth the 4. It has some very surprising elements for its age.
Its quite an unreligious work which is pretty strange for the era and have a lot of interesting things to say about monarchy, manliness, war, relationships etc. Someone even has an affair, which is a weird subjuect to discuss for the time.

In its darker places it comes close to the Walking Dead in terms or showing the failure of human nature in a crisis, and while it always pulls back from these brinks; Shelley having a little more faith in man (or at least English Man) than a modern writer; her opinion of Nature's nature is darker.
Overall, this might actualy be a more depressing story than the Walking Dead... yeah you heard that right! :P .

This is definitely only for the patient reader who can also withstand the early 19th century vocab, but well worth it if you can make it through.

P.S: There is a LibriVox recording, its done by many different readers so a little hit and miss in terms of quality but i did find it healpful to get through an extra chapter here and there.
There are also a couple of similar books i've run into, M.P.Shiels [b:The Purple Cloud|209525|The Purple Cloud|Matthew Phipps Shiel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1328817985l/209525._SY75_.jpg|923941] and [b:The Last Man|19273857|The Last Man|Alfred Noyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1386458115l/19273857._SY75_.jpg|23983125] by Alfred Noyes. This makes a very interesting comparison with those, especially with The Purple Cloud :lol . ( )

This book was okay, but it was too long and rambling for me. I liked the story and was interested in the adventure that the last man on earth had, but it was a little too nineteenth century for me. (Of course, I know it was written two centuries ago. I think people had more time for a good book and wanted to really read back in those days - they appreciated a story that went on forever.) ( )

In a future still decades away, a deadly disease shakes the world and threatens all its inhabitants.

This book is broken up into three volumes. In Volume I, the principal characters are introduced using the "tell" method rather than the "show" method. We are told how certain characters are, but we don't get a ton of viewing them in action. Dialogue is limited but long-winded when it appears. There is a lot of almost a drawing-room period piece where we are seeing how a bunch of young people might pair off into marriage or not. However, it would be a bad example of said genre as it's mostly incredibly dull. After reading the rest of the book, my conclusion is that the entirety of Volume I was unnecessary; a chapter (or two at most) introducing the characters would have sufficed.

Volume II deals with a war, environmental havoc, and a plague breaking loose across the entire globe. This sounds like it should be adventurous and page-turning, but Shelley somehow makes it mostly tedious. There are some passages that are indeed beautifully written but a lot of it is repetitive. Again, little dialogue except flowery monologues; the rest is mostly the narrator "telling," not "showing" how events are unraveling and characters are reacting. Still, this is undoubtedly the best part of the book.

Volume III is basically more of the same of Volume II. The plague is continuing to make its progress, but really the vast majority of this volume is essentially redundant with the previous volume. The inevitability of it all kind of takes away anything that might have been compelling.

In short, this book has a promising premise but is mired in tedious, overly wordy passages that amount to not much of anything being said. Personal dramas, politics, and a pandemic seem like the stuff to make a thrilling title but that just wasn't the case here. The characters were bland and/or unlikable, making it hard to care about their fates that the reader knew were coming anyway.

In sum, this is a totally skippable title. ( )

From the author of Frankenstein, this book describes a plague that wipes out everyone in the world leaving just one person to write the story. The book is over long and terribly wordy. ( )

This one had a (very) few interesting elements, and the account of the plague overwhelming the world was pretty chilly ... but overall, hardly a surprise this this novel has been largely forgotten. ( )

Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man” showed promise near the beginning:

“There is no fruition in their vacant kindness, and sharp rocks lurk beneath the smiling ripples of these shallow waters.”

And then took nearly two hundred pages to find another passage worth recording:

“She described in vivid terms the ceaseless care that with still renewing hunger ate into her soul; she compared this gnawing of sleepless expectation of evil, to the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus; under the influence of this eternal excitement, and of the interminable struggles she endured to combat and conceal it, she felt, she said, as if all the wheels and springs of the animal machine worked at double rate, and were fast consuming themselves.”

A main character dies in part one only to resurrect immediately from false rumor in the subsequent section—and I didn’t even give a shit. I could not wait to finish this book. Which saddens me since I enjoyed what I’ve read from Shelley, namely: “Frankenstein”, “The Pilgrims” and an assortment of short stories. I understand that it’s a precursor to what would become standard in the SF tradition, that it was a statement about the female voice (her own, really) in literature in her time, that it had incorporated a host of personal tragedies (the deaths of her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and two children, as well as their friend, Lord Byron), and that she had felt herself to be “The Last Man”, cut off from intellectual and emotional support and left in a world scarred with its own kind of plague. But, Jesus, did the whole work need to be so boring? For all the effort expended, the experiences and influences that had informed it, I was unprepared for the work to be largely expositional, emotionally detached (or ridiculously hyperbolic, which felt like the same thing, truthfully) and fraught with awkward phrasing. Any glittering poetic moment was quickly strangled in overlong sentences stuffed with information that neither propelled the narrative nor added substance to the imagery. And the last man of the title? Yeah, that doesn’t fucking happen until the final pages. So you go through this whole tedious ordeal only to be left with a man alone in an unfamiliar world trying to reckon his own humanity in the absence of any humankind. Later, Richard Matheson would explore this idea with unrivaled proficiency in “I Am Legend”.

Forerunner or not, classic or not, “The Last Man” failed me in so many ways as to be exemplary. I honestly cannot think offhand when I’ve been so absolutely disappointed in a book. Any social statements that the work may have offered were undercut by being too close to the subject, losing objectivity, staring into a maelstrom in which the ship with one’s entire existence in its holds had been lost, only to start the narrative with the painstaking details of each person involved with loading that cargo. The on-board bill of lading would’ve been more interesting. And, truth be told, the author’s introduction, which had almost nothing to do with the book, was the most engaging bit of writing in the whole damn version that I own.

“The Last Man-This-Could-Have-Been-So-Much-Better”. Tragedy doesn’t always make for better fiction. I realize that may be sacrilege for some; especially given that this work is deemed a “classic”. And while Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is iconic, painful and blooded with first-hand tragedy, too, it’s a far more riveting story. ( )

Much like all the reviews I've seen for this novel, I feel the need to preface my opinion with the statement that Frankenstein is one of my absolute favorites. This one just didn't cut it for me. The last third was an interesting picture of an empty, apocalyptic world, but the fact that it took me almost 300 pages of background information on the relationships of four one dimensional characters to get to any plot involving a plague means my suffering outweighed my enjoyment. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2674473.html

This is in some ways a slightly silly book, but in other ways profoundly interesting. The first half of it is dominated by the debate about the best way forward for Art, and for England, between Adrian - a thinly disguised Percy Bysshe Shelley, who happens to be the displaced heir to the recently abolished British throne - and his more ebullient friend Lord Raymond, who (apologies for the spoiler) eventually dies fighting for the Greeks against the Turks; can you imagine who he might be based on? In the year 2073 there has been no advance on technology since 1826, but our chums can just live in Windsor Castle and pop down to London now and then for a spot of governing. But given the importance of the relationship between Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to literature and especially to sf, it is fascinating to have an insight, even if a fictionalised insight, from one of the protagonists. However the interpersonal relationships bit is not as exciting as I would have liked.

The second half, when a great plague comes and wipes out humanity, is better executed but perhaps not quite as interesting. I recently read The Last Man (aka No Other Man) by Alfred Noyes, written over a century later but, I now realise, leaning a bit on Shelley; in both cases, the surviving central characters flee the post-holocaust England through a devastated France to find refuge in Italy. There are some great descriptions of places Shelley must herself have known quite well, and she doesn't shirk the awfulness of death by disease (which she had far too much personal experience of). Romantic ideals fail through death of the gallant protagonists. (Adrian, the Shelley character, drowns in a boating accident, in case you were wondering.)

There's a nice framing narrative of Shelley herself finding the text of the story in prophecy in the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl near Naples. And in general, it's very interesting as an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in knowing what happened to the author after Frankenstein - which was written 200 years ago this summer. ( )

My fortunes have been, from the beginning, an exemplification of the power that mutability may possess over the varied tenor of man's life

tl;dr version: More interesting as an artefact of early post-apocalyptic literature, and perhaps for the lightly hidden portraits of Shelley and Byron by someone who knew them very well. Hard going as a leisure read, but definitely interesting. This is no doubt, one of the earliest of the post-apocalyptic novels (although the post-apocalyptic tradition itself is immeasurably older). From that point of view it's fascinating. The book is set in an early 2000's that looks remarkably like the 1800's, other than England is a republic, the king having abdicated. Otherwise, there is still a war going on in Greece, class is still the biggest societal divide, and really, the society portrayed is more of a portrait of what was going on when it was written than any guess at how society itself may have changed in the future. Plotwise... well there's about 20 different plots going on at once here. It's very convoluted and involves many complicated love triangles and squares and possibly other polygons. Until, rather later in the book than I expected, tragedy strikes, as a vicious plague starts to kill everyone, everywhere. England, at first thought immune, quarantines itself, but eventually even that falls. It's terribly tragic, and awfully romantic (in the period sense, definitely not in the modern genre sense). As is typical of the time, and of Shelley's writing itself, it's quite dense. Here's the first paragraph:

I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless continents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far outweighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population. So true it is, that man's mind alone was the creator of all that was good or great to man, and that Nature herself was only his first minister. England, seated far north in the turbid sea, now visits my dreams in the semblance of a vast and well-manned ship, which mastered the winds and rode proudly over the waves. In my boyish days she was the universe to me. When I stood on my native hills, and saw plain and mountain stretch out to the utmost limits of my vision, speckled by the dwellings of my countrymen, and subdued to fertility by their labours, the earth's very centre was fixed for me in that spot, and the rest of her orb was as a fable, to have forgotten which would have cost neither my imagination nor understanding an effort.

It doesn't really get any lighter from there either! I found I could only stand a chapter or two a day, before I had to go hunting for some lighter fare. It's also really really long. You'll need either a classical education (which I don't have) or wikipedia on speed dial I think, to even make sense of a lot of the allusions. For instance the prologue is a tale of a journey to the sybilline oracles cave (and you are expected to know all about her already, which I didn't, much), and contains multiple quotes in several foreign languages. Personally I find that kind of thing fun if I'm in the mood for it, ymmv. It's also fascinating reading if you're interested in Byron and Shelley. Mary was banned by her father-in-law from writing about Shelley in a real biography, so she wrote him into her novels instead, and here a main character (Adrian) is heavily modelled on him (albeit unwittingly, according to her own letters.) Meanwhile another major character, Lord Raymond, is apparently suspiciously like Byron, the original mad, bad and dangerous to know character. Raymond is certainly all three of those. Readily available from Project Gutenberg among other places. ( )

Do not recommend - Interesting as a concept and as a historical document, less interesting as a novel.

It's a book Shelley wrote years after Frankenstein, considered the first apocalyptic plague novel (a book about humanity wiped out by disease and its repercussions), and it is really interesting in that sense that even 300 years later our zombie and other plague novels really do still use similar mechanics and models even with our more advanced technology and scientific understanding of disease.

That said, it's a hard one to read, especially as half of the novel is more of a gentleman's prolonged coming-of-age story and even once the plague hits most of the interesting developments are dryly summarized; it's a very different style of writing, and one that is difficult for a modern reader to connect to. ( )

I love reading classic literature and science fiction as well, so when I stumbled upon this book I thought I was in for a real treat. Wrong. It's very rare that I don't finish a book once I start it, but I just couldn't hang tough with this one. Trying to dig a stubborn splinter out of the bottom of your toe is more enjoyable.
( )

I'm glad I read this book.
As a fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, I felt like it was a must. Shelley didn't originate the concepts found here, but this is still arguably, the first actual post-apocalyptic novel, as such.

It was quite fascinating to see how many of the common tropes we find in so much of today's post-apocalyptic fiction are also found in this book: the urge to travel, even in the absence of a clear goal. Scavenging and exploring abandoned places. Hordes of those willing to victimize the unwary. Religious cults with a dark edge. The list could go on...

However, I have to say - normally, I am passionately opposed to any kind of bowdlerization or abridgement of any artistic work. BUT - I have never encountered another work which could so clearly have benefited from the ruthless work of a zealous editor.

This is touted as a book about a plague which lays waste to the earth. There is not even a passing mention of a plague until 37% of the way through the [extremely long] book. The entirety of the first part of the book is a dull pastoral drama which slowly introduces the characters and their romantic complications and woes. Note the emphasis on the pastoral. It's classically Romantic, bucolic idealism - with a bit of politics thrown in. I felt like I was reading about what the characters in a Maxfield Parrish painting do when they're not posing...


Although I found this part of the book frankly boring, in some ways it was definitely the best-written part of the work. It has the best character development and interactions. The characters are apparently based on Shelley herself and her close friends (the Romantic circle including her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, &c.), which generated interest in the book both at its time of publication and among Victorianists today.

In parts 2 and 3, the plague finally kicks in and some action starts happening. However, the narration style becomes very removed and distancing. It's all 'telling' not 'showing.' There's pretty much no dialogue. Although there are some quite interesting contents, actually getting through the pages was an effort.


Below, I've put in links to some contemporary reviews of 'The Last Man' which I found highly entertaining. [Incidentally, they also serve as a good reminder to some of today's more sensitive authors that scathing reviews full of personal attacks are nothing new in publishing.] I neither agree with nor condone the blatant sexism in some of Shelley's contemporaries' critiques, however, some of their complaints are all too valid.

One thing I was willing to give the author a 'pass' on was her utter failure to predict what the 21st century might actually be like. (The lifestyle of her characters feels more medieval than modern, in many ways). I found it interesting that even the reviewers of 1826 noted that the book lacked a sense of futuristic modernity.

They also noted the oddness - [and, to my view, inutility and lopsidedness] of the 'Sibylline' framing device.

But most of all - they noted the unnecessary bloatedness of the language used [The style is nothing like that of 'Frankenstein' - I would never have identified it as the same author had I not known that both books came from the same pen.]:

"But the pages in the work, of which this can be said, are comparatively few:--ornament, ornament, ornament, glittering conceit and spangled metaphor, heaped together without order, till meaning is lost in the glare of affected brilliancy, is the vice of these pages, the prevailing vice of the prose, and the poetry--of all that is called the amusive, and ought to be elegant literature of the day. Metaphors are not used to minister to compression, or enforce by vivid illustration; but to dilate sentences into pages, or substitute shewy verbiage for ideas."
http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/mschronology/reviews/pmrev.html
The Panoramic Miscellany, or Monthly Magazine and Review of Literature, Sciences, Arts, Inventions, and Occurences,1 (March 1826): 380-386.
Review of The Last Man (1826)

http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/mschronology/reviews/lgrev.html

http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/chronologies/mschronology/reviews/mrrev.html ( )

Looking up The Last Man to see what others thought of it I appear to be one of the few who enjoyed it immensely. I found it an interesting combination of fantasy and futurism. It finishes in 2100, and traces the downfall of the human race due to plague. As with many novels written during this era, there is a small set of characters, - as opposed to Dickens who peopled his novels with a quarter of the population of Victorian London. Written in three volumes it provides an excellent backstory of the main characters. If you look at the novel from the point of view of the present day, the novel has holes with areas such as transport and medical advances not predicted.

However, step back and view the novel from the original readership. When it was written, it was usually read out loud whilst the listeners worked on their projects such as needlework, or snoozing in front of the fire, it would have been discussed over tea or supper, and the progress of the hero and his family speculated upon. This would have added an extra dimension to the enjoyment of the novel. The beauty in the detail of the landscape took the reader to locations the reader may never have expected to visit, from the town of Windsor to the city of Constantinople, and in the descriptions of these, the British countryside and Italian coastal caves are beautifully detailed.

Mary Shelly also uses untranslated quotations assuming - quite rightly - the reader would know the quotation, undersstand Latin, French etc as they would at the time of writing. She also quotes her own mother Mary Woolstoncraft - which I thought was great as Woolstoncraft is a writer well worth reading.

Recommended, for those who like their novels with classical detail. ( )

The Last Man is indeed a game of two halves. The majority of the first half contains some of the most gushing romantic prose/twaddle that I have ever read. Here is the scenario: It is the year 2073 and Lionel and his sister Perdita are living by their wits in the mountains of Cumbria (England) after the death of their father who was banished from court by the late king of England. Adrian has abdicated in favour of a democratic government and retires to Cumbria where he meets and befriends Lionel and takes him under his wing. Lionel falls in love with Adrian's sister Idris, but must fight for her because Lord Raymond has returned from the Greek-Turkish wars and wants to marry Idris as a stepping stone to proclaiming himself the new king. Perdita falls in love with Lord Raymond who agrees to marry her leaving Lionel free to marry Idris. Lord Raymond's political and personal ambition knows no bounds and he manages to get himself elected as Lord Protector of England. Later he discovers Evadne a Greek lady living in poverty in London who he has known before, he becomes infatuated and when Perdita finds out she vows never to see him again. Lord Raymond goes back to Greece and is soon leading their army on a final assault on Constantinople. It is easy to conclude that Mary Shelley has based her character; Lord Raymond on her friend Lord Byron and that Adrian is Percy Shelley. Here is an example of the prose as Lionel describes his impressions of Adrian:

"Nor was it I alone who fell thus intimately his perfections. His sensibility and courtesy fascinated everyone. His vivacity, intelligence, and active spirit of benevolence, completed the conquest. Even at an early age he was deep read and imbued with the spirit of high philosophy. This tone gave an irresistible persuasion to his intercourse with others so that he seemed like an inspired musician, who struck with unerring skill, the "lyre of mind" and produced then divine harmony. In person he hardly appeared of this world; his slight frame was overinformed by the soul that dwelt within; he was all mind "Man but a rush against" his breast, and it would have conquered his strength; but the might of his smile would have tamed an hungry lion, or caused a legion of armed men to lay their weapons at his feet."

There is much of this stuff to read through as Shelley creates her fantasy world of Lionel, Adrian, Lord Raymond, Perdita and Idris living an unworldly existence in the castle of Windsor, popping out from time to time to deal with the business of ruling the Country. It could be an early draft for a novel written by Jeffrey Archer

There are claims that this novel should be classed as Science Fiction, but there is no Science here only fiction. The year 2073 is just like the year 1826 when the novel was published. People still travel on horseback, candles provide lighting, there have been no advances in medicine, communication, etc etc........ This is a novel of high Romance but it does turn very dark in the second half and the high flown romanticism is less obvious; in fact Shelley's prose is much more suited to her subject and the book becomes a fascinating hybrid.

Back to the story: Lord Raymond's assault on Constantinople is carried out almost single handedly because there are rumours that plague has devastated the city. Lord Raymond dies in a fire, but the plague starts to take hold of the Greek army. It sweeps through the continent killing all those who become infected. England feels safe for a time but cases are reported and soon it is just as virulent on the Island. Adrian is elected Lord Protector after Ryland (a man of the people) flees the infected city of London. The plague abates in the winter months but at the first sign of spring it continues to scythe down the population. A band of survivors group themselves around Adrian and Lionel and decide to head for Switzerland, but they are decimated along the way. Mary Shelley at last gets into her stride taking her novel out of the rut of some second rate romanticism into something that is quite unique for its time. The trek through the continent takes the form of a nightmare journey as all the survivors know that they are battling against insurmountable odds. There are passages of fine writing here as Shelley contrasts the failure of the human race against the backdrop of the natural world which is unaffected by the plague.

The novel is written in the first person by Lionel, who we understand may be the only survivor. He must watch helplessly as everyone else dies around him and this is one of the true horrors of this very gothic novel. Shelley's book has been picked over by many critics for what it might or might not say about; government, feminism, class and society and schools of thought, but I would say you may wish to be careful with this as you may not like what you find. The overriding impression that I got was that noble men were born to rule and while women could make a contribution that was as far as it goes. It is man's over riding ambition and lust for power that somehow leads to a force of nature that will cut him down to size. A long and sometimes tiresome read that is just about saved by the final third which takes it up to another level. Three stars. ( )

En framtidshistoria som är skriven 1826. Då framtiden i boken är vår nutid så vet vi att det är mycket som inte stämmer. Är ändock en läsupplevelse, allra främst textens uppbyggnad med långa meningar. ( )

I LIVED far from the busy haunts of men, and the rumour of wars or political changes came worn to a mere sound, to our mountain abodes. England had been the scene of momentous struggles, during my early boyhood. In the year 2073, the last of its kings, the ancient friend of my father, had abdicated in compliance with the gentle force of the remonstrances of his subjects, and a republic was instituted.

Until the beginning of chapter 2, I was wondering if this was an alternate history taking place in the year it was written rather than being science fiction set in the future. They are still relying on horse-drawn transport so journeys of any length take a long time, although Lionel does go from London to Perth in a hot-air balloon at one point, which enables him to get to Scotland in 48 hours. However the author was prescient in calling the British royal family the House of Windsor, as they didn't change their name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha until 1917, 191 years after the publication of The Last Man.

Unfortunately this was a terribly dull book. After reading a couple of chapters I made the mistake of looking at some reviews in the hope that they would say that it gets better further on, but they said the sane things I was thinking, that it is too long, tedious and verbose.

As I was reading it for a LibraryThing challenge, I switched to listening to the Librivox version, but it didn't help. This book is soooo DULL. Apparently all the male characters are geniuses, although they never do anything to prove it, and there are long, long lists of the female characters' womanly virtues. On this evidence, Mary Shelley does not seem to have inherited her mother's feminist views. And when it appeared that another love triangle was developing I decided that I couldn't bear to read or listen to another word of this tedious book. I gave up while reading chapter 8 of the first volume, so I didn't even make it as far as the start of the apocalyptic plague.

pheeeeeewwwww, loud and long sigh of relief. I have at last finished this book, more than 400 pages of verbose tedium. It was a struggle. Though set at the end of the 21st century, conveniently ending in the year 2100, the narrative describes a world barely advanced from that of the author herself in the early 19th century - no electricity, no technology, no form of transport other than on horseback or by boat - or balloon for those in a hurry (it takes six days from the south of Italy to the north of France). Battles are fought on horseback, with musket and cannon. England is a bucolic place with no industry, living from agriculture and, one presumes, trade (as warehouses in London are stocked with goods such as Indian silks). People still use thee, thou and ye and use a convoluted, archaic language. The Queen of England has been replaced by an elected Lord Protector, who governs from Windsor. And no antibiotics - which accounts for almost the entire population of the globe succumbing to the plague, leaving at the end just one survivor to write his tale for hypothetical descendants of survivors who will by chance understand English. Shelley writes long, poetic ungrammatical sentences with sometimes weird spellings (vallies, journies, pourtray...), and quite often I had to mentally remove commas that separated subjects from verbs and place them in the right place in order to grasp the meaning. Of course, Shelley could not know that Constantinople would become Istanbul, that Greece would not be a world power, that there would be two world wars and no Austro-Hungarian empire, or such things as telephones and computers, but I do wish she had been a little more inventive and far-sighted. The one star I have bestowed in the rating is for the illustrations, which are beautiful paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, exceedingly well chosen to match the mood of the text perfectly (really they merit 5 stars all to themselves but I wouldn't want anyone to think I liked the book). The one thing I have gained from reading this (and I was very tempted to give up many times along the way) is a realisation of everything we have achieved, and some of the valuable things we have lost, since Mary Shelley's day. ( )