The Old Man and Death, 1773, by Joseph Wright.
Getting here kind of late, this Tuesday evening. Tardiness does not excuse itself, and so instead of punctuality I offer you a great and ofttimes overlooked novel by the genius of Mary Shelley.
The Last Man by Mary Shelley. Oxford University Press. Fiction. Trade Paperback. ISBN 978019283865. 470 pp. Click on the picture above to purchase the book from Powell's Books and support the Devil's Accountant.
"The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me."
-Mary Shelley, Journal, May 1824
This book is not for everyone. Let me start with that. It doesn't merely drip with romanticism, it is soaked through. With good reason too. Percy Bysshe Shelley was dead. Lord Byron was dead. Given the romantics propensity for melodrama, how could Mary Shelley not help but feel like the last authentic being of a tragically beautiful race. If you think that sounds sappy, then you probably won't make it through all 470 pages and should stop reading now.
Sodden as the book might be with nostalgia and romantic excess, the plot and visionary scope of the book is strong enough to easily keep it together. The "O my tragic love(s)" and "Ah! The point is now at hand(s)" are numerous and the heartfelt tears of joy and anguish are legion. Even more prolific still are the proclamations of eternal and undying love. It is enough at times to make even the most star-fated of readers nauseous.
I'm not doing a very good job of selling you on this book. I can tell.
Well, then to that plot I mentioned.
The setting is England in the twenty-first century. England has become (in this future world) an aristocracy, vaguely republican in its construction, and given to nepotism. That is essentially England as it has been since the Magna Carta. Her imagination also reigns in short when she envisions such radical technological shifts as steam powered boats and locomotives. Steam power had existed in theory for hundreds of years before the novel's proposed century. Thousands of years if you count Archimedes, which you should. Steam locomotives and ships were well into (or beyond) experimentation at the time of the novel's publication in 1826.
Not exactly Jules Verne's brand of amazing. So again, not so much... I am failing this book rapidly.
To the point: Mary Shelley foresees the causal outcome of an increasingly connected world. Though her vision of steamships is somewhat comically short-sighted, her vision of the outcome of rapid transportation (these are very powerful steamships, mind you that travel at high speeds) and its effect on commerce, politics and human interaction is one that is chillingly similar to our world today.
This future world's geopolitics involve increasingly more and smaller wars. Imperialism is cloaked behind republican (note the lower case "r" - I'm not party bashing) ideals and driven mostly by mercantile forces. The small, manageable wars are quieter than the vast Napoleonic contests that Shelley's England was getting over in her day. In a strange way, Mary Shelley foresees the advent of modern warfare. Impressively she sees it as a political and economic necessity as much as a military-strategic one.
Additionally and central to the novel's plot is the other outcome of increased human connectedness. Disease. As steamships travel at faster and faster rates so does a seemingly unstoppable plague that has emerged on the world scene. In a still very pastoral England, the novel's chief characters take note, even concern in some cases, over this new disease but are powerless to control its spread.
The novel is also a roman-a-clef in the sense that two or more characters represent both the persons and ideals of Shelley's lifelong friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron. Percy Shelley manifests most clearly in the character of a young political idealist named Adrian. Byron appears in the noble bombast of Adrian's patron, the stalwart Lord Raymond. Add to this duo the young and greatly talented shepherd's son, Lionel, a man who Adrian admires and pushes to greater and greater heights and you complete the triangle.
It is not strange in the least that Mary Shelley should equate her status as woman with one of economic and social inferiority, requiring assistance from those of higher status to bring talents to bear. Certainly someone often called "the author of Frankenstein," as her pen-name often read, would be aware of lesser social status.
Despite the romantic excesses and tepid science fiction the reality of a quickly spreading disease and private interest fueled political collapse begins to sober the reader of the heady melodrama. Lionel emerges the protagonist, watching with great intelligence as his friends perish amidst the world's turmoil. Standing among the ruins of mankind, Lionel arrives at that most fated position in any end times story: the station of the last man. In a moment of reflection he dwells on a kindred soul.
For a moment I compared myself to that monarch of the waste - Robinson Crusoe. We had been both thrown companionless - he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world. I was rich in the so-called goods of life. If I turned my steps from the near barren scene, and entered any of the earth's million cities, I should find their wealth stored up for my accommodation - clothes, food, books, and a choice of dwelling beyond the comand of the princes of former times.
For all its prescience, The Last Man is yet also a quiet requiem for an era. The failed political ideals of the characters of Adrian (Percy Bysshe Shelley) and the impotence of Lord Raymond's (Lord Byron) bombastic energy are rendered painfully honest before the patient reader. Mary Shelley crafts a dirge for her people, the romantics, and in order to assure the funereal completeness to the requiem she must not only kill off her beloved friends and colleagues but also destroy the ideas they stood for.
The hyperbolic prose suddenly seems justified, does it not?
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