A futuristic story of tragic love and of the gradual extermination of the human race by plague, The Last Man is Mary Shelley's most important novel after Frankenstein. With intriguing portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, the novel offers a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and demonstrates the failure of the imagination and of art to redeem the doomed characters.

Customer Rating:
Summary: A Visionary Work
Comment: I recall seeing a "Twilight Zone" episode close to fifty years ago, about a man who really wanted to be alone. He got his wish when a nuclear war wiped out everyone else. He was quite happy at this state of affairs, migrating to the New York library to spend the rest of his life reading all the books. Unfortunately, he tripped on the steps and broke his thick reading glasses. So much for solitary bliss.

Being the last man on earth is once again a hot topic, with two recent movies addressing the issue. I Am Legend is set to enter theatres on Dec. 14, and as of Late November of 2007, a movie based upon The Last Man is in Post Production. The movie updates the setting of The Last Man to take into consideration the technology advances of the past two centuries plus the seventy-odd years that will take place before the novel's action begins. Looking at the trailer, however, it appears that technological accuracy is the only improvement made to Ms. Shelley's novel. For those interested, information on the movie can be viewed at their website.

Reading Mary Shelley's The Last Man will, if nothing else, send you running to your history books to find out, among other things, when Napoleon waged his wars for world domination (the battle of Waterloo took place in 1815-eleven years before The Last Man was published), when English Monarchs became more of a figurehead than a ruler (1867), and when Jules Verne first wrote about traveling in a balloon (Five Weeks in a Balloon in 1863, Around the World in Eighty Days in 1872), and what type of plague would kill a person before the sun goes down on his first sick day.

As in Frankenstein Mary Shelley shows herself as a sci-fi pioneer and visionary with enough political savvy to know that the strife between Christian and Muslim would not be resolved even two hundred years into the future. She also envisioned that in this distant future, we would not be safe from disastrous epidemics, although she did not suggest that germ warfare (rather than a natural spread of disease) might be the culprit. Her visions of balloon travel as a means of rapid transit predates Jules Verne by forty years, which helps us forgive the fact that in her story ground transport, even for kings, consisted of horseback or carriage.

The Last Man was published about four years after the death of Mary's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley drowned when his boat sank, a boat that Mary claims was not seaworthy, although a sudden squall might have caused the boat to capsize. Her husband's death in 1822 happened the same year that a miscarriage nearly took her own life and only two years after her half sister and Percy's ex-wife both committed suicide. One can see why Shelley's world-view might have been depressing, and The Last Man reflects this.

The story begins with a visit to a cave in which an unidentified narrator visits Naples in 1818, finding a manuscript in an inaccessible cave. The manuscript appears to be from the future, from the year 2079, and is written by one Lionel Verney, a close friend of the English king and Brother-in-Law to the greatest General since Napoleon. Verney will become the last man to inhabit the earth.

We follow Verney's manuscript from his early roots as a poverty-stricken orphan to his friendship with the heir-apparent to the throne of England and to a military campaign with his Brother-in-Law into plague-stricken Turkey, a campaign which touches off the worldwide plague that wipes out the human population of the Earth.

As much as I like and admire The Last Man as a visionary work, I also found a lot to dislike. I have read several books about real and fictional plagues, and have come to expect that one would at least see a description of what a plague victim experiences when in the throes of the disease. Shelley describes very little beyond a fever and a quick death. I would imagine that she was vaguely describing Pneumonic Plague, a mutation of Bubonic Plague that takes the pathogen airborne and which can kill in a matter of hours.

I also disliked Shelley's annoying habit of describing the outcome before she describes the action. I spent a lot of reading time backtracking because I was certain I missed something, since I seemed to have found out what was going to happen before I was supposed to. Our protagonist beset with grief, but I couldn't figure out why. As I read on, I discovered the reason for the grief, but since I already knew something bad was going to happen, the reading was more depressing than suspenseful.

On the up side, Mary Shelley's gifted use of the English language was perhaps better in this work than in Frankenstein. Also to her credit, Shelley, perhaps because of her many tragic experiences, quite accurately captures and expresses the angst of mourning. The Last Man was not Frankenstein, but if you have the patience to read it, you will find its mysterious makeup rather interesting.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Let His Death Crown His Life!
Comment: I am in ethereal love with Mary Shelley. Why is her literary importance and fancy not uplifted more than it is? I grimace whenever I go to a bookstore and glance each time at the Mary Shelley section to find only Frakenstein. She has other great books probably not many people know about. Such is the case in The Last Man. I thought Frankenstein was about as sad as one could allow a character to feel but after reading The Last Man Mary out does herself by really putting poor Verney in a pickle. This story really tugged at me hard and actually made me feel for the characters in a way so few books or movies ever have. If you know about Mary Shelley and have read Frankenstein or anything else by this, I feel, greatest author to have ever put word to paper, then you MUST read this beautiful accounting of "the last year of the world". It astonished me to find out that the book was out of print from 1833 to 1965. Wow! I failed to compare the story to such contemporary biological warfare or AIDS for that matter and took the story's meaning for what Shelley may have wanted to get across during her time that had neither. I believe she wants to almost persuade us of a deeper level of human condition and compassion by taking us as low as we can and then allowing us to constantly strive upward from that awful place she leaves Verney. Please, read more of Mary Shelley.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Mary Shelley Fantastic!
Comment: If you are a fan of the book Frankenstein, then you will
definetely enjoy this book. Mary Shelley is obviously
a gifted writer who is inciteful on human interplay.
The story is not so acurate when it describes the 21st
century, but that is not what the story concentrates on.
It is similar to Frankenstein about doomed characters
in a Greek tragedy. If your a fan of Mary then you must
buy this book.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Death and disease level all men
Comment: This novel is a combination of a `roman à clefs' and science fiction, with gothic and autobiographic elements.
In her vision of the end of the 21st century, Mary Shelley sees the Greek occupying Istanbul and England as a republic with three political parties (royalists, democrats and aristocrats). The leader of the democrats deserts his responsibilities through fear of the plague, while the intention of the head of the aristocrats (a highly idealized portrait of P.B. Shelley) is `to diminish the power of the aristocracy to effect a greater equalization of wealth and privilege and to introduce a perfect system of republican government.'
Byron (Lord Raymond) is not in the same league: `Power was the aim of all his endeavors. The selected passion was ambition.'

Her vision of mankind is pessimistic: `There was but one good and one evil in the world - life and death.'
For life, `The choice is with us; let us will it and our habitation becomes a paradise.'
But, `What is there in our nature that is for ever urging us on towards pain and misery? We are not formed for enjoyment; disappointment is the never-failing pilot of our life's bark, and ruthlessly carries us to the shoals.'
`It is a strange fact, but incontestable, that the philanthropist, who ardent in his desire to do good, who disdains other argument than truth, has less influence over men's mind than he who refuses not to adopt any means, nor diffuse any falsehood for the advancement of his cause.'

Man doesn't control his destiny and the whole of mankind is wiped out by the plague. But, even on the verge of total destruction, false prophets preach intolerance with their `pernicious doctrines of election and special grace'.

This book is brilliantly written: `He was no longer bent to the ground, like an over-nursed flower of spring that, shooting up beyond its strength, is weighed down even by its own coronal of blossoms.'

It has a few minus points: slow progression, too idealized main characters and a rather too simplistic cause of the whole destruction of mankind.
But, it remains a real discovery and a very worth-while read, with an excellent introduction by Pamela Bickley.

Many novels have the plague as subject. I recommend highly `Bassompierre' by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1797-1851)
Comment: The book chronicles a great global plague which annihilates the
world except for one man who describes the world's demise.
The work was first published in 1826. It was out-of-print from
1833 through 1965 and has been widely read thereafter. Shelley's
"Last Man" has been resurrected due to the tremendous interest
in potential plagues like bird disease, global warming, continental earth movements, super hurricanes and out-of-control comets randomly threatening the earth of the future on a periodic basis.

Even Nostradamos talked about the world's end in the year 3797.
The volume is written in the English literature of the 1800s.
The language is superior. In spots, the vocabulary is of the
highest order. Here is a sample:

" She dwelt in a cottage whose trim grass-plat sloped down to
the waters of the lake of Ulswater; a beech wood stretched up the hill behind, and a purling brook gently falling from the
acclivity ran through poplar-shaded banks into the lake. "

Another unforgetable passage reminds us of Shelley's poetic
nature interwoven into the overall story. Details follow:

"The golden splendour arose, and weary nature awoke to suffer
yet another day of heat and thirsty decay. No flowers lifted up
their dew laden cups to meet the dawn; the dry grass had
withered on the plains; the burning fields of air were vacant of
birds; the cicale alone, children of the sun, began their shrill
and deafening song among the cypresses and olives. "

Just prior to the year 2100, Shelley paves the way for the
chaos in the making. A sample paragraph describes the
apprehension in the wind:

" This was not universal. Among better natures, anguish and
dread, the fear of eternal separation, and the awful wonder
produced by unprecedented calamity, drew closer to the ties of
kindred and friendship. Philosophers opposed their principles, as
barriers to the inundation of profligacy or despair , and
the only ramparts to protect the invaded territory of human
life; the religious, hoping now for their reward, clung fast
to their creeds, as the rafts and planks which over the tempest-
vexed sea of suffering, would bear them in safety to the harbour
of the Unknown Continent. "

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published a number of memorable
works around the time of "The Last Man". Her other works were:
- Perkin Warbeck in 1830--the author's fourth novel
- Lodore is published in 1835.
- Faulker is published in 1837

On February 1, 1851, Mary Shelley died.

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