The Purple Cloud

Rating:
Summary: Every Loner's Fantasy
Review: A cloud of gas that smells like peach blossom kills nearly every everyone in the world. Adam Jeffson is the only man left. He spends years looking for other people, wandering through the remains of civilization.

One of the benefits of being the last man on Earth is that you would have the freedom to do whatever you want. The planet would be literally yours. Adam takes advantage of this. He becomes more and more eccentric, travelling around the world, burning cities to the ground. He wants to wipe out all trace of humanity, to make it look as if the human race had never existed. This could be put down to a symptom of Adam's growing madness - a madness caused by enforced solitude.

The premise is a good one. "The Purple Cloud" sounds like an HG Wells novel in style. The language is a bit flowery, but I didn't mind that. (The book was published in the early 1900's after all.) When you read this book you travel around the world with Adam and find the same thing - emptyness, stillness, silence. How would you cope?

In 1959 a film called "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" was released. It was supposedley based on "The Purple Cloud", but it had nothing to do with MP Shiel's story.

Rating:
Summary: The Purple Cloud: The Last Man On Earth Goes Quietly Mad
Review: Every time that I see a series of short phrases printed on a book praising extravagantly that book, I am reminded of THE PURPLE CLOUD by M. P. Shiel. Typical of the blurbs: 'Colossal, brilliant novel--H. G. Wells' 'A genius drunk with the hottest juices of our language--The New York Post' And the clincher, 'Had Carlyle shared Coleridge's penchant for laudanum, he might have written thus--The English Review' I find it difficult to accept such claims at face value for any book in which they appear. As I read THE PURPLE CLOUD, I simply could not understand nor believe in the veracity of these plaudits. The book is a colossal bore. Absolutely nothing happens in 99% of a plot that can be summed thusly: a man survives a rolling purple cloud which kills everyone else, and he spends the rest of his life burning cities to the ground. Now this in itself does not disqualify a book from being a classic or even from retaining a modicum of interest. When any novel is written such that the majority of action is internal, then I expect the author to do something with that internalized thought. George Stewart in his novel EARTH ABIDES wrote of a similar theme, but he made the reader care about his protagonist by allowing him to grow, to learn, to finish the work with a deeper understanding of himself and the upside-down world in which he inhabited. The protagonist of THE PURPLE CLOUD, ironically named Adam, reacts only by turning Ahab, seeking out cities to torch, but unlike Melville, who gives Ahab a missing leg to serve as motive, Shiel does nothing comparable for Adam. Instead, what the reader sees is that Adam is not a sane man, a flaw which might be an excuse for an irrational character but not for an irrational author. As the years of Adam's self-imposed Odyssey continue, the names of the cities begin to blur, to become one, finally enabling one to visualize that Adam's goal is misplaced; he seeks to immolate the entire earth rather than man's former domination of bits and pieces of it. Since Adam is alone, Sheil is forced to use a prose style that eschews dialogue and focuses on first person point of view description of a burning world. This technique of writing begins to pall long before the final pages. Surprisingly enough, he does find another human being, a young girl, whom he unpredicatbly names Leda. It is with this stuttering Leda-Eve that he plans to repopulate the earth. He closes the book with a stern warning to all future generations: 'Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.' My reaction to this bit of philosophical fluffery was to paraphrase: 'Though any author may slay me with terminal ennui, yet will I not praise Him.' Note to overenthusiastic reviewers: save your praise for books that say something worthwhile.

Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic Fossil!
Review: I call The Purple Cloud a fantastic fossil because that's what it is. That is not a criticism. I gave it 5 stars. It's simply that the fact it was written in 1911 shows -- both good and bad. Some of the science is off the wall, but I assume accurate for the day. The novel has a fantastic, hypnotic beginning set in the arctic. Like the jungle of Tarzan (written, I think, about the same time), this arctic landscape never existed, but it's a fantastic place of torment for the hero. Why is this book worth reading? The writing is hyptnotic. They don't write like that anymore. Dense, lush with an incredible poetic language, we follow the hero's solitary wanderings across an empty earth. This is a story of the last man on earth. This is a fossil, an archetype for all the later stories about the last man left alive on earth. A purple cloud came by and killed all while the hero was racing to the North Pole. What carries you along is the hero's interior as he undergoes one slow painful change within himself after another as he searches for another survivor, Does he find anyone? That's for the reader to learn. When you see the movies The Omega Man, The Quiet Earth, The Night of the Comet(this is a comedy) and all the other last man on earth movies, this was the great granddaddy of them all.

Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic Fossil!
Review: I call The Purple Cloud a fantastic fossil because that's what it is. That is not a criticism. I gave it 5 stars. It's simply that the fact it was written in 1911 shows -- both good and bad. Some of the science is off the wall, but I assume accurate for the day. The novel has a fantastic, hypnotic beginning set in the arctic. Like the jungle of Tarzan (written, I think, about the same time), this arctic landscape never existed, but it's a fantastic place of torment for the hero. Why is this book worth reading? The writing is hyptnotic. They don't write like that anymore. Dense, lush with an incredible poetic language, we follow the hero's solitary wanderings across an empty earth. This is a story of the last man on earth. This is a fossil, an archetype for all the later stories about the last man left alive on earth. A purple cloud came by and killed all while the hero was racing to the North Pole. What carries you along is the hero's interior as he undergoes one slow painful change within himself after another as he searches for another survivor, Does he find anyone? That's for the reader to learn. When you see the movies The Omega Man, The Quiet Earth, The Night of the Comet(this is a comedy) and all the other last man on earth movies, this was the great granddaddy of them all.

Rating:
Summary: The Purple Cloud
Review: If you can handle the purple prose, you might like The Purple Cloud. Other than that, be prepared to read a story where the hero, Adam (was there ever any doubt?), goes it alone for most of the novel.

Frankly, I liked the book best when Adam had to deal with people, so that means the beginning and end. At the start, Adam goes from reluctant participant in a North Pole expedition that promises both glory and wealth, to someone who remains silent when he suspects his fiance, Clodagh (think Neferteri, from Heston's The Ten Commandments), of smoothing his way onto the expedition roster by poisoning rivals, to someone willing to kill and hide the body, out on the ice, during the final windswept run for the top of the world. The opening struggles of Adam are perhaps the most exciting, and they also force him to be a survivor, while at the same time laying him bare as a man of questionable character.

But the purple cloud changes everything, wreaking worldwide destruction, as Adam treks back from the north, alone. Once he re-enters the domain of civilized humanity again, he watches as the evidence slowly mounts: the real loneliness is just beginning, all the people are dead.

Thus begin the prolonged middle sections of the novel, where I feel we lose touch with Adam's psyche, where the emphasis is on what he is doing, not why he is doing it. It's very odd: The narrative is in the first-person singular, and yet it's as if we watch Adam swing from city-burner to pious temple-builder and back again--over decades, in fact--but it's like watching an unpredictable madman do both sacred and profane things, without knowing why. True, he appears mad, but the narrative itself remains clear, mostly sensible, if florid. Adam, then, becomes a very active whirlwind--almost like the living tail end of the purple cloud--and the only thing that really becomes clear, at one point, is that he does become content to be king of a dead world. Then he meets Leda.

The introduction of a second survivor of the apocalypse does help revitalize the book, and some of Adam's old complexity in dealing with people resurfaces. Just how will he treat Leda? It becomes clear, as he educates her and communicates with her once she knows words, that he is highly resistant to repopulating the world. In fact, he begins to think of murder.

This is a novel that actually fits in well with other scientific romances, long and short, of the time, most notably, works by Jack London, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and of course H. G. Wells. It is a fairly quick read despite the language, and Adam's movements across a barren landscape are, I suppose, an interesting way to try and understand what has happened to his mind. But the evidence suggests that the purple cloud traps us on a world with a madman, who may be too far gone even when the last woman arrives to try and save him.

Interesting but somewhat unsatisfying reading, visionary for its time.

Rating:
Summary: Lush,imaginative use of language.
Review: make this book really worth reading. I find the descriptions of an empty world chilling, the familiarity with some of the places(in England) making the story at once believable yet terribly strange to me. Shiel is a romantic, bringing the story to an optimistic end for our poor protagonist (hasn't the poor guy suffered enough...!), even though it seems like Leda gets the short end of the stick once more(Victorian women were made of stern stuff!).In the end it is Shiel's rich and unusual descriptive style that really made this book stand out for me and I look on it as something original, captivating and totally refreshing compared to the lame language used in a lot of modern fiction.

Rating:
Summary: A post-apocalyptic tale from the early 1900s
Review: No one has yet succeeded in reaching the North Pole, and a new British expedition is mounted. As our protagonist, Adam, returns from the arctic, all the humans and many of the animals he encounters are dead. Adam travels all over the world, looking for other living people and, understandably, going kind of bonkers.

I wanted to like this book more. Early in the book, Adam finds himself in many morally challenging situations, but he has these voices in his head that more or less compel him to act in certain ways, so the reader is prevented from really entering into any moral struggles with him. I liked the writing, but each place Adam goes is essentially like the rest--everyone's dead--and I kept waiting for something interesting to happen. Near the end, something finally did, but then I mostly wanted to slap Adam around for being so dense.

Maybe I'm just jaded from reading too many post-apocalyptic stories and that's why I'm not more enthusiastic about this book. If you're new to this sort of story, you might find this book to be a powerful exploration of loneliness and the meaning of human society and human life.

Rating:
Summary: The Purple Cloud
Review: This is the first and best science fiction book I read. I searched for another copy of it for 20 years until I found one on Amazon.com. I read it once again and loved it just as much as the first time. It takes you on a most fantastic voyage, never to be forgotten. Full of great adventure and excitement, I love this book!

Rating:
Summary: English tradition
Review: This is the typical English disaster story in its earliest stages. Think John Wyndham, John Christopher, J.G.Ballard -- maybe the average English sf writer is a total loner and what he's really writing is wish-fulfillment!.... This book does have a quality all its own, vaguely reminiscent of William Hope Hodgson and I enjoy the old-fashioned textures. If you're at all interested in the origins of the genre, this would reward you on that score alone.

Rating:
Summary: English tradition
Review: This is the typical English disaster story in its earliest stages. Think John Wyndham, John Christopher, J.G.Ballard -- maybe the average English sf writer is a total loner and what he's really writing is wish-fulfillment!.... This book does have a quality all its own, vaguely reminiscent of William Hope Hodgson and I enjoy the old-fashioned textures. If you're at all interested in the origins of the genre, this would reward you on that score alone.