Review by Marian Powell   —   March 1, 2001

Frankenstein will never be reviewed here because it is considered a classic and classics are rarely lost. The Last Man failed when it first came out and was soon forgotten. Why didn't people want to read The Last Man in 1826 and why, by contrast, is it worth reading today?

The Victorians enjoyed the story of Frankenstein because it did not threaten them personally. No one expected a mad scientist to create a monster in real life. By contrast, The Last Man is about a mysterious plague that threatens to destroy the human race. No one in 1826 understood how disease spread or how to combat it. It was normal for parents to lose half their children to disease. Victorian readers did not want to read about a plague when illness was a constant threat to their lives and happiness.

While today we don't live with the Victorian level of disease, we do have Aids, the threat of new viruses such as ebola and the rise of old diseases that have become immune to antibiotics. The situation described by Mary Shelley in this novel could begin tomorrow

It's a curious experience to read a novel written close to 200 years ago, especially when its message is so relevant to our time. The language is as different from our language today as eating a five course dinner is different from eating a fast food hamburger with fries. At one point in reading, I became impatient with the density of the writing and decided to skim a few dozen pages. I immediately had to go back and reread what I had skipped because I realized I had missed vital plot elements and character development. The novel may be written in a style that is a little foreign to us today, although it was typical for its day, but it is extremely well-written. At times it seems wordy, but the words are not wasted unlike many modern novels which, no matter how short they are, waste half their words.

I highly recommend the Oxford World's Classics with the Introduction by Dr. Paley (1994). His introduction adds an extra layer of meaning by briefly telling the life of Mary Shelley. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, a brilliant early feminist who died soon after the birth of her daughter. Her father was a brilliant philosopher whose circle of friends included the most talented men of the day, including the brilliant poet, Shelley. At the age of 16, Mary eloped with Shelley and wandered around Europe with him for the next eight years. At the age of 18, she wrote Frankenstein. At 24, she was returned to England a widow with a baby and sat down and wrote The Last Man. In it, according to the Introduction, she recreated her husband and his circle as seen through the eyes of her narrator, Lionel. So if you've ever wondered what Shelley and Lord Byron were "really" like, this novel gives you at least a partial answer.

The Last Man takes place 200 years in the future. It's an interesting image of the future for essentially she recreates the England of her day with only minor changes. Mary Shelley was not Jules Verne. She was not interested in future inventions. Her interests were political and humanitarian. Therefore, as they were in real life, her characters Adrian and Raymond (Shelley and Lord Byron) are idealistic political reformers.

What I felt was a weakness is that her women are mostly portrayed in conventional Victorian terms. As a reader, I at first found this very disappointing and frustrating but as the story moved on, I realized she was also being very subtle. In Victorian society, a heroine was always totally devoted to the man she loved. In The Last Man, one woman's devotion is portrayed in painful detail. A woman's marriage becomes unhappy. Nothing is available to the woman except to focus on her own misery and eventually she kills herself. It's a subtle and vivid portrait of the lack of choices available to the women of that day. Mary Shelley never comments on it. She simply shows it and one has to remember that she herself had lived a very unconventional life with Shelley, including deciding to have a career as a self-supporting writer after his death.

An even more remarkable social commentary is made when one of Lionel's friends go to war. It's an idealistic involvement in a war between Greece and Turkey that England is not involved in. He returns home wounded. That sounds conventional until you learn that his injuries resulted not from battle but from trying to stop his own troops from committing atrocities. Lionel comments that enemy civilians are human beings and deserve good treatment and protection. This was written long before the Red Cross or the United Nations.

Political reform, a foreign war and an unhappy marriage in a novel about a great plague? The author is saying something profound about the human race. The novel is structured in three parts. The plague is not mentioned in the first part. Mary Shelley clearly wants the reader to become completely involved in the life of her narrator, Lionel. Therefore, part one begins like a typical Victorian story with Lionel telling the dramatic story of how he was orphaned at the age of five and had to struggle to make his way in the world. We follow his struggles with interest and rejoice when his fortunes change. He and his sister become friends with the royal family of England, are soon moving in the highest circles in London and involved with a group of political idealists who are working on plans to create an ideal political system. Along the way, of course, there are the complicated romances that were typical of Victorian novels.

It is while we are deeply involved in these political and romantic tensions that Lionel casually mentions hearing reports of a very bad plague in China. He is briefly concerned, but, after all, what happens in China cannot possibly affect life in England. The plague is not mentioned again for many more chapters. We remain focused on the political and romantic problems of Lionel and his friends as some of them become involved in the outbreak of war between Greece and Turkey. Suddenly, the plague arrives in Europe. People are worried about that, but still there's the feeling that it's far away and in any case, England is an island and can always quarantine herself if the need arises. Lionel, at this point, is deeply concerned about some personal problems. They loom larger in his life than a plague in another country. He is like a man who is very busy and observes storm clouds billowing up on the horizon. He goes on about his business while frequently glancing up at the sky to observe the progress of the storm.

I'm not going to reveal anymore of the plot except to say that at this point the novel is only half over. The pattern by now should be clear. Life, normal life, goes on while a growing, global catastrophe is ignored because it's far away, it can't happen here and everyone has enough worries in their own lives to focus on. It sounds like a metaphor for the AIDS epidemic and the way it grew from a disease people regarded as a threat only to a minority group to the global epidemic it is today. As a result, it is now devastating the world. Then I realized that you could also take this as a metaphor for the threats posed by global warming and the whole question of man's effect on the environment. Or you could read this as a study in the way the Holocaust under Hitler, the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the genocide in Africa are allowed to happen. Or you could look at any other evil that is briefly noted, commented on and then ignored and forgotten and allowed to grow.

The Last Man shows us the process by which we allow ourselves to ignore that which must not be ignored. It shows us how it's possible to hear the approaching footsteps of doom and be too involved in our own lives to pay attention. It demonstrates the terrifying ability of the human race to ignore the approach of the enemy until the enemy is at the gates.