What I'm Reading: Mary Shelley, "The Last Man"
Added 2017-08-15 16:30:40 +0000 UTCThe Last Man is my favourite novel and it was a pleasure to re-read it! As the name implies it’s about the last human being on Earth, Lionel Verney, from birth to childhood, marriage, adulthood, to the plague that leaves him the sole surviving member of the human race.
Shelley published the book in 1826 but it’s set in the 21st century - the Plague first emerges in 2092 - so it’s fascinating to see what she thought today’s world would be like! It’s a weirdly pastoral, idealised version of her own time, complete with aristocracy, horse-drawn carriages, and a still-operational British Empire (!) but also feathered airships and no more royal family. Also racism.
Shelley wrote it following the death of her husband, and the passages describing Verney’s loneliness are all the more powerful because, to me anyway, it seems like she’s holding back there? The events that finally kill off the other two survivors of the Plague and leave Verney totally alone are similar to those in which Percy Shelley died, and yet the most powerful imagery in the book is reserved for the moments of love, not sorrow, like when Verney meets the woman who eventually becomes his wife. Despite the horror and the inevitable desolation that the title implies, it’s quite a hopeful book in its way.
The book contains some passages that I think are some of the best text ever committed to English. Several I’ve come back to again and again in difficult times. There’s a gorgeous sequence when Verney has only been alone for a month or so: he goes to the Vatican and talks to and hugs the marble statues because they’re the closest thing to a human shape left in the whole world. And the final paragraph is - god - just breathtaking.
If you haven’t read this one already, you can pick it up here very cheaply - it’s brilliant.
