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A review by cyborgforty
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
4.0
Technology aside, Mary Shelley got a lot of things right. That plague would befall the twenty-first century and the climate will show us her wrath, yet in the midst of it all we will still be clinging to our domesticity, we will still insist on conquest and war, we will indulge in science yet fail to apply it for the betterment of society, we will splinter into factions of religion, we will still be putting on productions of Shakespeare as the world comes to an end.
But the progression of technology was slower in Shelley's era and she could never have seen the electronic world that we inhabit today: this book is an idealistic, best-case-scenario vision of humanity that---sure, yes, fragments here or there, but for the most part---clings to community and society to endure plague, that still has appreciation for the beauty of nature and non-human beings. In some ways her world is more radical than ours---can we really do away with the English monarchy by the end of this century? For a world ravaged by plague of Eastern origin (hmmmm....), there is little xenophobia between the (mostly European) countries that Lionel & co. traverse; the English welcome immigrants (refugees!) fleeing the plague from all parts of Europe, and while the narrator does lament the fall of India, China, and the East to plague, I suspect they may not have been so hospitable to refugees from these regions.
The first half of this book was painfully slow. Mary Shelley loves to write in chronological order, and in the case of Frankenstein and Mathilda who did not live past their twenties, she doesn't have to do too much explaining in the first few chapters, but the bulk of this story happens after Lionel has married and started a family so... yeah. Something something about the influence of nostalgia in Mary Shelley's narrators, who write from their deathbeds or from the solitary desk of The Last Man On Earth. Chapter I of Volume II is really where it became a page-turner for me.
Last note: Mary Shelley's depictions of nature and astronomical phenomena are gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.
But the progression of technology was slower in Shelley's era and she could never have seen the electronic world that we inhabit today: this book is an idealistic, best-case-scenario vision of humanity that---sure, yes, fragments here or there, but for the most part---clings to community and society to endure plague, that still has appreciation for the beauty of nature and non-human beings. In some ways her world is more radical than ours---can we really do away with the English monarchy by the end of this century? For a world ravaged by plague of Eastern origin (hmmmm....), there is little xenophobia between the (mostly European) countries that Lionel & co. traverse; the English welcome immigrants (refugees!) fleeing the plague from all parts of Europe, and while the narrator does lament the fall of India, China, and the East to plague, I suspect they may not have been so hospitable to refugees from these regions.
The first half of this book was painfully slow. Mary Shelley loves to write in chronological order, and in the case of Frankenstein and Mathilda who did not live past their twenties, she doesn't have to do too much explaining in the first few chapters, but the bulk of this story happens after Lionel has married and started a family so... yeah. Something something about the influence of nostalgia in Mary Shelley's narrators, who write from their deathbeds or from the solitary desk of The Last Man On Earth. Chapter I of Volume II is really where it became a page-turner for me.
Last note: Mary Shelley's depictions of nature and astronomical phenomena are gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous.