Tediously maudlin, How far we have come, in so many ways.

The first half is a 2 star, with the second half being a 4.

I tried, but I just couldn't get into this book. It just reminded me too much of reading for English class in high school. Maybe I'm just not a classics person.

A very misleading title as (spoiler alert) only the last like 20 pages are about him actually being the true LAST man. But still, an interesting read. What makes it especially intriguing is the fact the book takes places 2100ish and yet is still very reminiscent of Shelley's time. Considering I thought she only wrote Frankenstein, I was pleased this was well written.

Wow! There was a lot of... um... description and atmosphere in this book. At multiple points I wanted to build a time machine, travel back to 1820 or whenever, and ask her to kindly get to the point. I know it is a Romantic novel (the style, not the theme), but the atmosphere should add to the story, not BE the story. At one point I counted 3 different similes describing the same thing. Whew.

That being said, the story itself was very good. The characters were very well described. I probably would have really liked this story if someone would have edited it down significantly before it was published.

Overly florid and filigreed with no true engagement with any of the important issues embedded in her scenario.

The few spine tingling moments in this novel came from the fact that it is in places close to the coronavirus pandemic (still occurring at the time I read this), but in general, it was a novel where I kept waiting for something to happen, and then it didn't. Some would say the adventure is in the journey not the destination, but this felt like being lost in a car with three kids constantly asking "are we there yet?"

Shelley's lesser-known novel is rather dreary. Being about a plague that wipes out humankind, I suppose that's to be expected. It's a long book, though, and didn't really need to be that long. It also needed to keep more of a focus on the logistics of the plague.

Because it's all kind of vague. Shelley introduces this plague that will wipe humanity out, but she doesn't go enough into the actual effects of it. Sometimes she seems to remember to describe what's happening to people affected by the plague, and she focuses more on it in the last third of the book, but often it seems like the plague is secondary to everything else she's doing. It's even interesting that most of the important characters don't actually die from the plague themselves. It's as if Shelley didn't really want to deal with what the plague was all about at all: she just wanted to deal with the emotions of the characters.

She doesn't even do that wholly effectively for me. There is some sense of the masses making hay while the sun shines, going to excess before the plague can swoop in and claim them, which sounds like human nature, and there's religious fervour and fear-mongering as the plague hits hardest, which also is realistic, and there's a sense of hopelessness generally, but there isn't enough about Lionel's sense of loss. That all just gets swept over. There are moments of emotion, but nothing seems to change Lionel. It's no good telling us he's bathed the pages of his narration with tears: we don't see that. Show, don't tell, Lionel...or Shelley.

I didn't like the depiction of the women for the most part. All self-sacrificing angels. Perdita was the most problematic female character, sacrificing everything for Raymond. I'm also unclear why the plague was gendered female. Plenty of misogyny at work here.

I'm also at a loss to know why Shelley set the story hundreds of years in the future. She could easily have set it fifty or sixty years in the future for all the futuristic elements there were here. Perhaps it was because of the anti-monarchy sentiment. Still, if airships are the only futuristic element you're going to have in your futuristic novel, it would perhaps be better not to set it so far in the future.

There seems to be two novels here, to me. One is Shelley's lament for her lost husband and their friend Byron, told through the stories of Adrian and Raymond, and one is an exploration of what humanity would be like in its last days. She manages some aspects of both well, and her attempt to question the success of the Romantic project is interesting and brave, but the two aspects don't cohere into a good novel for me. I liked parts of it, but other parts I found overblown and tedious.