Guide to the Classics: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is a prophecy of life in a global pandemic

6 May 2020 by particularkev

Mary Shelley is famous for one novel – her first, Frankenstein (1819). Its extraordinary career in adaptation began almost from the point of publication, and it has had a long afterlife as a keyword in our culture. Frankenstein speaks to us now in our fears of scientific overreach, our difficulties in recognising our shared humanity.

But her neglected later book The Last Man (1826) has the most to say to us in our present moment of crisis and global pandemic.

The Last Man is a novel of isolation: an isolation that reflected Shelley’s painful circumstances. The novel’s characters closely resemble the famous members of the Shelley-Byron circle, including Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his friend Lord Byron, and Mary’s stepsister (Byron’s sometime lover), Claire Clairmont.

By the time Shelley came to write the novel, all of them – along with all but one of her children – were dead. Once part of the most significant social circle of second-generation Romantic poet-intellectuals, Shelley now found herself almost alone in the world.

As it kills off character after character, The Last Man recreates this history of loss along with its author’s crushing sense of loneliness.

Mary Shelley (kneeling far left), Edward John Trelawny, Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron at the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1882, painted by Louis Édouard Fournier c1889.
Wikimedia Commons

Imagining extinction

The novel was not a critical success. It came, unluckily, after two decades of “last man” narratives.

Beginning in about 1805, these stories and poems came as a response to great cultural changes and new, unsettling discoveries that challenged how people thought about the place of the human race in the world. A new understanding of species extinction (the first recognised dinosaur was discovered around 1811) made people fear humans could also be extinguished from the Earth.

Two catastrophically depopulating events – the horrifying bloodshed of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815), and the rapid global cooling caused by the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 – made human extinction seem a horrifyingly imminent possibility. Meditations on ruined empires abounded. Many writers began to imagine (or prophesy) the ruination of their own nations.

Unfortunately for Shelley, by 1826 what had once seemed a shocking imaginative response to unprecedented disaster had become a cliché.

A parodic poem like Thomas Hood’s The Last Man – also from 1826 – gives us an indication of the atmosphere in which Shelley published her own book. In Hood’s ballad, the last man is a hangman. Having executed his only companion, he now regrets he cannot hang himself:

For there is not another man alive,

In the world, to pull my legs!

In this hostile atmosphere, critics missed that Shelley’s novel was very different to the rash of last man narratives before it.

Consider Byron’s apocalyptic poem Darkness (1816), with its vision of a world devoid of movement or life of any kind:

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –

A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.

In contrast to this total death, Shelley asks her readers to imagine a world in which only humans are becoming extinct. Attacked by a new, unstoppable plague, the human population collapses within a few years.

In their absence other species flourish. A rapidly decreasing band of survivors watches as the world begins to return to a state of conspicuous natural beauty, a global garden of Eden.

Mary Shelley imagined a world without humans could be a return of wild nature. Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church, c1860.
Wikimedia Commons

This is a new theme for fiction, one resembling films like A Quiet Place and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, or images of the depopulated Korean demilitarised zone and Chernobyl forest, those strange and beautiful landscapes where humans no longer dominate.

A world in crisis

Shelley was writing in a time of crisis – global famine following the Tambora eruption, and the first known cholera pandemic from 1817–1824. Cholera spread throughout the Indian subcontinent and across Asia until its terrifying progress stopped in the Middle East.

It’s disturbing today to read Shelley ventriloquising the complacent response from England to early signs of disease in its colonies. At first, Englishmen see “no immediate necessity for an earnest caution”. Their greatest fears are for the economy.

As mass deaths occur throughout (in Shelley’s time) Britain’s colonies and trading partners, bankers and merchants are bankrupted. The “prosperity of the nation”, Shelley writes, “was now shaken by frequent and extensive losses”.

In one brilliant set-piece, Shelley shows us how racist assumptions blind a smugly superior population to the danger headed its way:

Can it be true, each asked the other with wonder and dismay, that whole countries are laid waste, whole nations annihilated, by these disorders in nature? The vast cities of America, the fertile plains of Hindostan, the crowded abodes of the Chinese, are menaced with utter ruin. […] The air is empoisoned, and each human being inhales death even while in youth and health […] As yet western Europe was uninfected; would it always be so?

O, yes, it would – Countrymen, fear not! […] If perchance some stricken Asiatic come among us, plague dies with him, uncommunicated and innoxious. Let us weep for our brethren, though we can never experience his reverse.

Shelley quickly shows us this sense of racial superiority and immunity is unfounded: all people are united in their susceptibility to the fatal disease.

Eventually, the entire human population is engulfed:

I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot on its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.

Throughout the novel Shelley’s characters remain, ironically, optimistic. They don’t know they’re in a book called The Last Man, and – with the exception of narrator Lionel Verney – their chances of survival are non-existent. They cling to a naïve hope this disaster will create new, idyllic forms of life, a more equitable and compassionate relationship between classes and within families.

But this is a mirage. Rather than making an effort to rebuild civilisation, those spared in the plague’s first wave adopt a selfish, hedonistic approach to life.

The “occupations of life were gone,” writes Shelley, “but the amusements remained; enjoyment might be protracted to the verge of the grave”.

No god in hopelessness

Shelley’s depopulated world quickly becomes a godless one. In Thomas Campbell’s poem The Last Man (1823) the sole surviving human defies a “darkening Universe” to:

quench his Immortality

Or shake his trust in God.

As they realise “the species of man must perish”, the victims of Shelley’s plague become bestial. Going against the grain of Enlightenment individualism, Shelley insists humanity is contingent on community. When the “vessel of society is wrecked” individual survivors give up all hope.

Finished Reading: The Road to Ruin – How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government by Niki Savva

2 May 2020 by particularkev

The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government by Niki Savva
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Finished Reading: Edmund Barton by Geoffrey Bolton

30 April 2020 by particularkev

Edmund Barton by Geoffrey Bolton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Five novels with a real sense of place to explore from your living room

30 April 2020 by particularkev

Christine Berberich, University of Portsmouth

Everybody knows the concept of “desert island books”, the novels you might pack if you were going to be marooned on a desert island. Thanks to the pandemic, many of us are indeed now marooned, except that instead of lazing on palm-fringed beaches, we’re in lockdown – in urban apartment blocks, suburban terraced houses or village homes.

A good book can help us forget about the world around us and also substitute our longing for pastures greener. It can take us from our sofa to the beaches of Thailand (as in Alex Garland’s The Beach) or to the streets of New York (as in Paul Auster’s City of Glass).

So, as someone who researches and teaches literature, I’ve chosen five novels that allow me to be elsewhere in my mind, whether that’s a glorious English countryside setting, the streets of a European metropolis, or the urban sprawl of an unnamed Indian city.

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day tells the story of Stevens, the aged butler of Darlington Hall, and his ill-judged life choices that saw him being involved, albeit only on the fringes, with British fascism in the interwar years.

This allusion to British fascism in particular is something that makes this novel stand out: it is a subject matter not often discussed or even taught.

But at the moment, I can particularly take solace in Ishiguro’s beautiful descriptions of the countryside that Stevens – unused to the freedom of travel – encounters during his journey across south-west England:

What I saw was principally field upon field rolling off into the far distance. The land rose and fell gently, and the fields were bordered by hedges and trees … It was a fine feeling indeed to be standing up there like that, with the sound of summer all around one and a light breeze on one’s face.

As the lockdown drags on, this is a feeling I am longing for.

W.G. Sebald: The Emigrants

This collection of four novellas is predominantly set in England and Germany but also offers glimpses of the US, Egypt, Belgium and Switzerland. Focusing on a different protagonist in each novella, Sebald portrays how the long shadows of the second world war have affected individuals – but also how Germany has engaged with its troubled past.

A gentler images of pre-war Germany.
Amazon

His descriptions of the town of Kissingen’s illuminated spa gardens, with “Chinese lanterns strung across the avenues, shedding colourful magical light” and “the fountains in front of the Regent’s building” jetting “silver and gold alternately” conjure up images of times gone by and a town as yet untroubled by the scourge of antisemitism.

Sebald’s narrative is a collage of fiction, biography, autobiography, travel writing and philosophy. His prose is so full of quiet beauty and eloquence that it always helps me forget my surroundings and enter a quiet and contemplative “Sebaldian” space.

Patrick Modiano: The Search Warrant

The Search Warrant pieces together the real-life story of Dora Bruder, a young Jewish girl who went missing in Paris in December 1941.

Modiano attempts to retrace Dora’s movements across Paris and his book is full of evocative descriptions of quiet squares and bustling streets where she might have spent some time.

In comparison with the Avenue de Saint-Mandé, the Avenue Picpus, on the right, is cold and desolate. Treeless, as I remember. Ah, the loneliness of returning on those Sunday evenings.

From the first page it is clear that the city of Paris assumes the status of a character – and as readers we can follow the narrator’s (and Dora’s) movements on a map.

If we are familiar with Paris, we can picture where they are. By tracing Dora’s possible steps, Modiano evocatively recreates the twilight atmosphere of Paris under occupation.

Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance is a sprawling narrative that takes the reader all the way to the Indian subcontinent.

Set initially in 1975 during the emergency government period and then during the chaotic times of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Mistry’s novel focuses on the lives of four central characters whose lives are on a downward spiral, from poverty to outright destitution and, ultimately, death.

Mistry does not whitewash the reality of urban poverty in India. His narrative does not hide away from disease or overcrowded slums with “rough shacks” standing “beyond the railroad fence, alongside a ditch running with raw sewage”. His are not places where we might want to be. But as readers, we become utterly engrossed in his characters’ lives – we hope with them, we fear for them and, at the end, we cry for them.

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante’s novels take me straight to my favourite city of Napoli. Starting with My Brilliant Friend, the four novels chart the intensive relationship between two girls, Elena “Lenù” Greco and Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, who grow up in a poor neighbourhood in the 1950s.

Reading Ferrante’s sprawling narrative conjures up images of Napoli and makes me feel like I am standing in the Piazza del Plebiscito or having an espresso in the historic Caffè Gambrinus. Together with Lenù, I can see Vesuvio across the Bay of Naples, the:

delicate pastel-colored shape, at whose base the whitish stones of the city were piled up, with the earth-coloured slice of the Castel dell’Ovo, and the sea.

I can feel, hear and smell Napoli around me. Reading about the city might not be as good as being there in person; but, at the moment, it is a close second.

Of course, books can’t stop a global pandemic. But, for a short while, they can let us forget the world around us and, instead, transport us to different places, allowing us to at least travel in spirit.

Christine Berberich, Reader in Literature, University of Portsmouth

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Finished Reading: Grant Takes Command by Bruce Catton

27 April 2020 by particularkev

Grant Takes Command by Bruce Catton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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Secrets and scandals: where Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir fits in the rich history of prime ministerial books

23 April 2020 by particularkev

Joshua Black, Australian National University

Landing in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, it may seem strange former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir has generated so much political controversy.

Turnbull has been accused of hypocrisy and championing socialism, and has been threatened with expulsion from the Liberal Party.

In A Bigger Picture, Turnbull deals candidly with his antagonists inside the Coalition, who fought him bitterly on the same-sex marriage reform and climate policy. Similarly, he names and shames those he blames for the leadership insurgency of August 2018. All of this was expected, but none of it must please the current government.

But is the book any more inflammatory than previous prime ministerial memoirs?

Political controversy is a trademark of political memoir publishing in Australia. A Bigger Picture is just another page in that story.

Until the 1960s, prime ministerial memoirs were the exception, not the rule. Between 1945 and 1990, just three former prime ministers chose to publish books about their political lives. Two of them – Billy Hughes and Robert Menzies – produced two books each, and both political veterans sought to avoid “telling tales out of school”. Both seemed more interested in foreign affairs, particularly our imperial relationship to the UK in the case of Menzies.

The dismissal of the Whitlam government provoked both Sir John Kerr and Gough Whitlam to publish their memoirs. After reading extracts of Kerr’s Matters for Judgement, Whitlam decided to “set the record straight immediately” by writing The Truth of the Matter. His second book, The Whitlam Government, was also designed to make a political splash. Promising to explain the “development and implementation” of his policy program, the book was timed for release on the tenth anniversary of the dismissal itself, ensuring maximum publicity.

Since then, political controversy has accompanied prime ministerial memoirs, in part because incumbent political parties and leaders have had a vested interest in how these books might affect their popularity.

In his 1994 political memoir, Bob Hawke accused his rival and successor, Paul Keating, of calling Australia “the arse-end of the world” during an argument about the Labor leadership. Further, Hawke accused Keating of failing to support Australia’s involvement in the Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Keating, who was attacked in parliament in October 1994 over the claims, called both allegations “lies”. Hawke offered to take a lie-detector test to prove his sincerity. Senior ALP figures recorded their outrage at Hawke’s memoir. But Hawke hit back, describing them as “precious self-appointed guardians of proper behaviour”.

Hawke’s predecessor also damaged his relationship with his own party in the process of publishing his memoirs. Malcolm Fraser’s Political Memoirs, written with journalist Margaret Simons, was recognised as one of Australia’s top ten books of 2010. His outspokenness – in the book and in his post-prime-ministerial life more generally – earned him many attacks from Coalition MPs.

John Howard handled the politics of his memoirs better than most politicians. Though the book was antagonistic toward his former treasurer, Peter Costello, Howard promised to “deal objectively” with events and relationships in Lazarus Rising. Ever the party stalwart, Howard and his publishers re-issued the book after the 2013 election with a new chapter that touted Tony Abbott’s “high intelligence, discipline […] good people skills”.

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard both publicly took aim at one another in their memoirs, which made for plenty of media fodder. In My Story, Gillard described Rudd’s leadership as a descent into “paralysis and misery”. Rudd returned fire, calling her book her “latest contribution to Australian fiction”. However, he was unable to dent the book’s commercial success.

Four years later, Rudd in The PM Years accused Gillard of plotting “with the faceless men” to become prime minister. In a bid to patch over the historic rifts, he subsequently promised the Labor Party’s 2018 National Conference that the “time for healing” had come.

Critics of Turnbull’s book – such as Sky News’ Andrew Bolt and 2GB’s Ben Fordham – have argued that he and his publishers, Hardie Grant, were wrong to “betray confidences” and divulge “private conversations”.

In reality, political memoirs have always pushed against conventions of political secrecy. In the 1970s, British cabinet minister Richard Crossman published his Diaries, which included detailed descriptions of how cabinet functioned. The British establishment subsequently conducted the Radcliffe review into political memoirs and diaries. It found such material should be kept secret for 15 years, but that civil servants could do little to stop their political masters from publishing.

In 1999, Australia’s Neal Blewett was warned that publishing his A Cabinet Diary, recorded seven years earlier, could lead to prosecution under the Crimes Act because it revealed confidential cabinet discussions. Calling the public service’s bluff, Blewett published anyway. He explained in the book that “a few egos will be bruised, but cabinet ministers are a robust lot”. His diary shed significant light on the trials and tribulations of a ministerial life.

Since then, countless MPs and ministers have published books that claim to accurately represent personal conversations, some based on private notes (as Costello claimed in his memoirs), others on diary entries (as is the case in Turnbull’s book). In recent years, politicians have reproduced text messages and email exchanges in their books, as Bob Carr did in his 2014 book, Diary of a Foreign Minister. In each version of history, the author is the essential policymaker.

In his book, Turnbull reveals private conversations and WhatsApp exchanges with colleagues, world leaders, public servants and more. His accounts of cabinet discussions are hardly ground-breaking: cabinet debates about the economy and national security under the Abbott government, for instance, were thoroughly detailed in Niki Savva’s The Road to Ruin, while the acrimonious debates about energy policy, same-sex marriage and home affairs inside the Turnbull government were laid bare in David Crowe’s Venom. Similarly, Turnbull’s criticisms of News Corporation’s biased reporting have been aired elsewhere, and stop short of Rudd’s argument in The PM Years that Rupert Murdoch should be the subject of a royal commission.

Turnbull’s book is another addition to the history of incendiary political memoir publishing in Australia. Political parties and their media associates have confirmed once again that a successful parliamentary memoir requires deft political management.

Ultimately, A Bigger Picture is not the compendium of revelations that some may perceive. Instead, it is another picture of politics in which “character” and “leadership” reign supreme at the expense of all other political forces.

Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.