Neither hope nor joy are my pilots

[bloodygranuaile]

 If you know me at all you probably know that, as a big old goth weirdo, one of my absolute favorite books is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In addition to having read it multiple times, for fun and for class, and written at least two papers and a short story draft about it (or more precisely, about how much I hate Victor), I have over the years been an avid consumer of Frankenstein-adjacent media and of biographical material about Mary Shelley and her gang of annoying misfits. I read The Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation; I read The Lady and her Monsters; I saw the biopic Mary Shelley in theaters (and I am abysmal at seeing movies, especially in theaters); I went to the Readercon where she was the Memorial Guest of Honor (sadly, Memorial Guests of Honor don't tend to actually go to the convention the way regular GoHs do. I was hoping if anyone could make an exception, it'd be her, but I was disappointed). Overall, I'd say I stan the Queen of Goth and Mother of Science Fiction fairly hard.

 

My one major hit to my Mary Shelley fan cred is... that I've not necessarily bothered to read her stuff besides Frankenstein. Some of this is just because I have doubts that anything was going to improve on either Frankenstein itself or on all the goth-as-fuck biographical tidbits about her, like that she carried Percy Shelley's calcified heart around with her for decades. But some of it is because nobody else talks about her other work and I never seem to see it in bookstores? It's easy to forget she even wrote anything else, and even easier to decide that it must not be very important, then. The one time I've seen a non-Frankenstein Mary Shelley book in the wild was at Readercon, when Tachyon Press had a beautiful edition of The Mortal Immortal: The Complete Supernatural Short Fiction of Mary Shelley. Obviously, I bought it; not so obviously, I actually read it (my track record for reading the short story anthologies I wind up buying at Readercon is... not great); I liked it well enough, but five years later I can't remember a damn thing about it and had to go back and reread my review to remember what the stories even were. 

 

So it is with that peculiar feeling of productive satisfaction paired with shame that one gets from finally doing stuff one should have done ages ago that I can report that I've finally read Mary Shelley's post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man, an early entrant into the "all of humanity is wiped out" sci-fi subgenre. I read it because a handsome man on the internet told me to, which is, to put mildly, not usually a reason I do things — but there are a lot of books out there, and for me to pick one up usually requires either a) that I see it or b) that at least one other human in the world acknowledges that it exists and says something about it being worth reading. Additionally, the technologically curated persona that is the left-wing internet's parasocial boyfriend really does appear to have solid literary taste. 

 

Before we get into the plot, I have to talk a bit about STYLE: namely, there is A LOT of it. Your attitude toward rolling around in long, beautiful, emotionally wrought sentences will make or break your ability to enjoy this book. It is an early nineteenth-century British novel. The content might have a lot of interesting stuff to say about the failures of Romanticism, but the writing itself is British Romanticism through and through. If you've read Frankenstein (or probably any other nineteenth-century Gothic) you sort of already know what you're getting into. If you don't like that stuff; if your tastes adhere closely to the modern "Invisible Writing" school of stylistic thought (which I was meticulously trained on and which I do adhere to in my professional life, as someone whose job is to Marie Kondo sentences until only the necessary bits are left) (don't laugh; I can do it fine when it's other people's sentences), then you'll probably hate this book at least as much as you're going to hate everything else written before 1920 or so. Characterization is frequently "told, not shown" in a way that would make a modern editor's eyes twitch. This is because the purpose of, uh, "describing" the characters is to impress upon you the narrator's emotional attachment to them, not what they're actually like; welcome to Romanticism (it's like Twitter, but wordier).  This "feels over reals" approach to describing stuff at g r e a t l e n g t h is a legitimate hallmark of old gothic and romantic fiction, which does not stop many modern readers from detesting it.

 

If, on the other hand, you have a lot of patience for slow plots provided you get to indulge in pages of poetic set descriptions and temper tantrums of internal narration liberally sprinkled with anguished em-dashes, HAVE I GOT THE BOOK FOR YOU. I am, despite the jokes, dead serious. Every page of this book is beautiful; I frequently found myself stopping and reading sentences multiple times because they were just so good and I wanted to take at least a cursory stab at being able to remember them later (I won't be able to, but I tried). It is possible I reread more sentences because I wanted to than because I had forgotten what I had just read, which is no mean feat for me these days (in addition to the attention deficit brought on by recovering from periodontal surgery, I have also for many months been in a state of advanced burnout that has rendered me incapable of sustained focus). From the five-line, sappily nationalistic first sentence to the desperate final paragraph, an atmosphere of roiling grief pervades the entire book. Sometimes it is melancholic and wistful, and sometimes it is much more worked up; sometimes it is borderline insane, which the book wouldn't be a proper Gothic without.  (There is also an opening vignette that sets a wonderful tone of mystery and long-lostness, although I must admit that I have no idea why the hell it's there or how it relates to the main story; we never come back to it and it doesn't really make much sense as framing device.) 

 

Our hero and narrator is Lionel Verney, the titular LAST MAN (this is always in small caps), because this book was titled years before the advent of spoiler culture. The orphaned son of an impoverished and exiled nobleman in a late-21st-century England where the monarchy has been quietly retired and a republic of sorts has been set up, Lionel grows up more or less feral in the sheep fields of northern England. Intensely sociable, but proud and with a significantly sized chip on his shoulder about what happened to his dad, teenage Lionel is well on his way to a lifetime of being a belligerent jackass when he is swept off his feet by Adrian, the guy who would have been the crown prince of England if England still did that, whomst is such a refined and genius godlike being that he single-handedly turns Lionel's life around by talking at him for an evening. 

 

The back cover of my copy of the book says that Shelley based Lionel on herself and "a pair of characters" on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron; it is trivially easy to spot who is who. Adrian is obviously based on Percy, not because of any resemblance between Adrian's actions in the book and any of the weird shit Percy Shelley did in life (he was a very strange dude), but because Mary/Lionel is unabashedly over the moon about him. Adrian is beautiful, frail, poetical, philosophical, principled, caring, idealistic, self-sacrificing, and a natural leader; whatever he does, we are told he is doing it well, whether it is untranscribed conversation or unspecified political reforms; in short, he bears only the most superficial of resemblances to any of the biographical depictions of Percy Shelley I have ever seen. 

 

Because this book was written in the nineteenth century and Mary Shelley went and made herself a dude in it, Adrian of course also has a slightly (but not very much) younger sister, who is a lot like him except female, and therefore suitable for Lionel to fall rapturously in love with and eventually marry. This is not a knock on Idris, who is a perfectly good character, and well matched with Lionel in that they are the two least annoying characters in the book. (It is very nice to have a narrator that I don't want to throw bricks at, in sharp contrast to Frankenstein.) 

 

Lionel also has a younger sister! Her name is Perdita, and she has strong gothic heroine energy; she starts off as a fey, reserved child, prone to long walks in the woods with her own imagination and disinclined to talk to anybody. Young Perdita was my favorite character for the early parts of the book; unfortunately, later on, a dude happens to her, and it's all downhill from there -- especially as the dude in question is the one based off Lord Byron. It's easy to spot that Raymond is based on Lord Byron if you have any familiarity with either Romantic biography or Romantic fiction, since enough fictional characters have been based on that guy that he's become an archetype. 

 

Raymond quite predictably winds up in the middle of the love quadrangle that provides a lot of the melodrama in the bits of the book before everyone starts dying. Adrian is in love with a slightly older (i.e., eighteen) Greek princess named Evadne; Evadne, however, is in love with Raymond, who is building a portion of his career out of periodically going off to heroically fight the Turks on behalf of the Greeks; Raymond is flattered but marries Perdita instead, which is fine for several years until he meets back up with Evadne and carries on a secret friendship (?) with her, which either is an affair and Shelley had to write around explicitly saying that at any point, or which Perdita understandably thought was an affair because it's sort of weird to keep platonic cross-sex friendships secret. Perdita never recovers from this because she has subsumed her entire sense of personhood under being Raymond's wife, which is the sort of thing that Romantics tended to think was very romantic and that I think is a dire and horrifying reminder of the need for feminism. 

 

Domestic and political developments make up the sole plotlines of Lionel's memoir in the first volume; in the second volume, while war and familial discontent still rage, the plague strikes. At first it seems like a normal, if especially vicious, sort of pestilence, breaking out in a besieged city in the middle of a sweltering summer. Over the course of the second volume, as the pestilence grows from an outbreak to an epidemic to a pandemic, coming back summer after summer, it becomes clear that this is a civilization-ending plague, whittling down the mass of humanity to nothing. By the third volume, the human population of the British Isles has been reduced to a few thousand people rattling around a largely empty London, trying not to lose their minds from stress and grief. They eventually try to leave London and head to Switzerland, vaguely out of the idea that it'll be cooler and therefore maybe safer, but also possibly just for something to do. By the end of the book, Lionel, alone, having finally lost his last and companions, explicitly goes to Rome just to have something to do, writes his memoir, and then leaves Rome just to have something else to do.

 

The politics of this book were... a little hard to notice from my current vantage point, if that makes any sense. Reading about a plague that devastates humanity but leaves the rest of Nature mockingly intact seems less horrifying than it otherwise would -- in a way, it almost reads like an "out" for Nature -- in a time of massive climate anxiety, when even staid and respectable scientific organizations are putting forth dense, boring white papers with theses like "We have 12 years to end capitalism or we're going to melt civilization." It's hard for me to get into the sort of headspace where I can feel the book as some sort of threatening challenge to Romantic ideals about fixing everything with art and philosophy, because those ideals seem positively childish to take literally. (I admit I'm also distanced from them because it's been many years since I read any of these dudes.) Of course we can't art our way out of either plague or climate collapse; that's self-evidently absurd. If we all immediately adopted a robust ecosocialist program, like as a rational political radical I want to do, we'll at best be able to mitigate the damage. I mean, is anyone still placing humanity at the center of the universe? People these days seem split between Team Planet Earth and Team Petrodollars. In the context of 2019, The Last Man is in many ways a straightforward thriller about a world-encompassing force inexorably bearing down on you to kill you and everyone you love while Nature thumbs its nose at human pretensions to civilization; i.e., baseline reality speeded up a bit for dramatic effect. The personal flaws of the main characters have apparently been interpreted by literary critics as exacerbating the plague; I'm honestly not sure I picked that up either: I figured the plague was fucking coming for them whether they were effective political leaders or not. The depiction of societal breakdown as all the people disappear was certainly interesting, but I'm not clear on what effect it was supposed to have on the overall mortality rate. I was much more interested in the psychological effects of the plague on the people living through it, especially when it became so all-encompassing that anyone dying of normal stuff like old age started to seem strange. It is, of course, always possible that I am misreading either the novel or the limited historical litcrit I've perused because of one or another of the existential or medical sources of brainfog I'm currently dealing with. 

 

It would probably be worth going back and rereading this book sometime in the future when I have more brain cells to read it with, but for the moment, it was honestly just nice to take a break from reading about fascism and go back to my Gothic roots. 

...I gotta read something cheerful soon, don't I.