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Mia Forbes looks at Rudyard Kipling's tale of a child growing up in India against the backdrop of
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Aug
22
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30
Mary Shelley (1797 – 1851) is best known for her
seminal horror novel Frankenstein (1818),
but her later work The Last Man (1826)
is just as original and ground breaking. It is one of the great dystopian
novels and indeed set the trend for fantasy writers such as H.G. Wells, Jules
Verne, George Orwell, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Philip K. Dick, amongst others, to
paint bleak portraits of the future. Indeed, so gloomy was Shelley’s vision of
the end of human civilisation as presented in this book that after its first publication,
when it received damning reviews, it was not seen in print again until the
mid-1960s when it was reassessed and is now regarded as a crucial early work of post-apocalyptic science fiction.
One cannot help but wonder whether Mary Shelley’s
gloomy outlook inherent in this text was influenced by her own personal
tragedies: her mother died ten days after her birth; three of her children died
in early infancy; her step-sister committed suicide and her husband, the poet,
Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in 1822. It is perhaps unsurprising that the
novel presents a dark and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable
destruction. However, one might say that its theme is perhaps more relevant
today with the threat of global warming, and international tensions, than it
was when it was first written.
The nightmarish story of
The Last Man envisions the end of civilisation
and tests the resilience of humanity, as well as its capacity for sorrow and
grief. It deals with the apocalyptic
effects of a terrible plague that devastates the Western world. Set in the
2090s, it begins by relating the political and social tumult in Great Britain
and Greece before the arrival of the plague.
One of the interesting
aspects of the novel is that
it presents semi-biographical portraits of Romantic figures, intimates of the author, particularly her late husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Along with
these individuals of the Romantic age comes the exploration of their ideas involving
social change. Thus, we see these high-minded, idealistic philosophies dwindle
into irrelevance as society crumbles,
until we are left with only the narrator, who believes himself to be the last
man on earth. As the novel develops, Shelley offers
a vision of the future that expresses a reaction against Romanticism, and
demonstrates the failure of the artistic imagination to save the doomed
characters.
Shelley maintains that
the text of the novel is based on documents she discovered while visiting Sibyl’s Cave in Naples. This locale is associated with Cumaean Sibyl, the priestess presiding over the Apollonian oracle. These documents, while
containing ancient written prophecies also include the tale of Lionel Verney,
the last man on earth.
Verney is the novel’s narrator and he relates the story of his life and how he became The Last Man - the
only human remaining alive after plague sweeps the world. He is largely
an autobiographical figure for the author herself. Verney is friends with Adrian, the Earl of Windsor, the son of the last King of
England who abdicated less than a generation earlier. Adrian is motivated
by philosophy and philanthropy, rather than ambition and is based on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Byron is
represented by Lord Raymond who
has achieved fame for his military efforts on behalf of Greece against the Turks, but
eventually chooses love over his ambition to become ruler of England as Lord Protector.
Verney and Adrian associate
with a group of other aristocratic figures before the plague breaks out in
Europe. These characters eventually make it to England, then travel from
place to place in a desperate attempt to find a safe refuge. Verney, the only
one to survive the plague through some kind of immunity, describes societal
breakdown and the rise of destructive doomsday cults.
As the title
suggests, the novel ends with a single man on the earth, a solitary survivor
who marks the history and downfall of his friends and all of humanity. The
final moments are, to me, reminiscent of the denouement of Frankenstein, where the monster makes a final solitary trek into
the bleak arctic wilderness. Shelley provides a wonderfully eloquent eulogy for
humanity, which because of its poetical tone and philosophical fervour is
reminiscent of the work of her late husband:
But the game is
up! We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the wide inheritance
of earth. We must all die! The species of man must perish; his
frame of exquisite workmanship; the wondrous mechanism of his senses; the noble
proportion of his godlike limbs; his mind, the throned king of these; must
perish. Will the earth still keep her place among the planets; will she
still journey with unmarked regularity round the sun; will the seasons change,
the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in
solitude? Will the mountains remain unmoved, and streams still keep a
downward course towards the vast abyss; will the tides rise and fall, and the
winds fan universal nature; will beast pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim,
when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things, has
passed away, as though he had never been? O, what mockery is
this! Sure death is not death, and humanity is not extinct; but
merely passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions. Death is
a vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to pass; let us exist no
more in this living death, but die that we may live!
The Last Man remains a difficult work to dramatise. However
there have been several very loose adaptations ‘inspired’ by the novel. In 1924 there was an American silent comedy film which
took elements from the book. The movie was remade as the semi-musical comedy It's Great to Be Alive (1933). In
2019 there was a further film which scraped a few ideas from Shelley’s novel as
well as using the title. This version was a modernised take on a dystopian
future, but it failed to please the critics, one of whom described the film as,
‘a thoroughly unpleasant experience from start to finish, and not even in an
artful way. It is relentlessly bleak…’
By its very nature, a story which in one sense reflects the time in which it was written and yet imagines the world over two centuries hence, has little chance of being convincing or satisfying in a dramatised form. It must be left to the imagination, which is much more fertile and flexible than a film script, to deal effectively with Mary Shelley’s fascinating narrative. In other words, it is a work that is at its best and most effective when it is read.
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