Customer Reviews

The Purple Cloud (Bison Frontiers of Imagination)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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. A similar but much better post-apocalyptic novel is Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."

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!

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.

I got halfway through this book some six months ago and then just put it down for a while. Finally picked it back up and finished it today, and I must admit, for being an ancestor of the post-apocalyptic, last-man-on-earth genre, it carries some unique qualities.

On the downside, this was just a difficult read, period. The prose was incredibly dense: sometimes an entire page was but one run-on sentence! No paragraph breaks, few semicolons, and even fewer commas. I tried to make an audio version of this book, and found I could not pitch the sentences properly, since I could not see their end!

I'm quite practiced at reading, writing, and speaking, always at the head of my class even into the graduate level. That being said, this book almost *wasn't* English, not as modern-day Americans understand it, at least. I have a rather sizable vocabulary, but this was the first book to leave me hard-pressed to determine what he was talking about half the time:

"I paced between the oak pwes of the nave - massive stalls they are, separated by Corinthian pilasters ...some little angels with strangely human faces, Greuze-like, supporting the nerves of the apse" and so on.

Honestly, I'd swear he was making up the words half the time. Sentences ran far too long to keep the thread of things easily; I took to scanning over his florid descriptions but cautiously, for the most obscure little phrase within any block of text could trigger something that I would then be unable to understand.

That being said, I really liked the book. Along with "Earth Abides," these are the only two books that take their time looking at a world where man just... disappeared. Most post-apocalyptic stories talk about some war-ravaged earth, or one wherein civilization had been thousands of years ago. In stories like that, Earth might as well be Mars for the reader.

Contrarily, "The Purple Cloud" and "Earth Abides" allow the reader to leisurely stroll through a world that, in one sense, looks exactly like always, yet in another, feels inverted, nightmarish in such ordinary alienness. An emptied - yet undamaged - world always feels far more gripping and interesting to me. In this, Shiel most certainly provides.

Like I said, getting through his wording is like jogging in sand, and the guy he describes is pretty bizarre, wacked, and selfish, but I still find it a beautiful book, especially as the reader is slowly drawn from the lifelong nightmare of the protagonist's depravity into a beauty he'd never have guessed, let alone dared believe in.

Definitely a must-read, a keeper, and a read-again.

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.

It's an experiment that can never be performed, but it's worth thought anyway: how would a man act if there were no one to answer to? Adam Jeffson is that man, and this is his world.

Back in 1901, when this was written, parts of the earth's surface remained unmapped, including the north pole. Jeffson is part of the expedition to reach that pole - as sole survivor, he finds it (an actual upright pole, it turns out), and struggles back to civilzation to claim his reward. No one is left to give it, though. During the months of his trek, catastrophic volcanoes unleashed poisonous gasses that cover the world, killing off every bird, beast, and man, except for him alone. At first, he scours the globe in search of other survivors. After years of solitary confinement in the world-wide jail, his civilized spirit fails. He turns to the decadence of drugs and pointless wealth. Decadence turns to active nihilism, a self-declared mission of arson and destruction, a modern Nero who blasts and burns entire cities for his own amusement. Then ... well, I'll try to avoid spoilers, but his name is Adam and 1901 was not an era that tolerated wholly unhappy endings.

Just reading history books won't tell you how nervous that era was. Political tremors were building up to the quake that triggered the first world war. Medicine hadn't made the inroads against disease that modern generations assume, as the 1918 Spanish flu would soon show. The earth itself could turn against mankind, as the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa had shown. Sheil captured that sense of fragility, and his words preserve that sense for today's reader.

This book also preserves the style of writing that prevailed back then, something that might be even less familiar today. Think of the effort that moviemakers put into the special effects of today's media, then realize that writing was that era's medium. The pyrotechnics are all there, but in the florid vocabulary of the writing.

The story is a fair one, and could work well if recast as a modern adventure movie. More than that, though, "The Purple Cloud" records the fears, the values, and the literary style at the turn of the last century. It succeeds at many levels.

-- wiredweird

Most of the text of this fascinating novel involves the adventures of one man who is absolutely alone in the world. It is not everyone who can handle a novel with only one character, and this a character who of necessity must be insane. Shiel manages to deal with this very well. He mitigates the horror by having the millions of dead bodies fail to rot or stink. The ending is rather sentimental. It might have been more effective if Adam had not met his Eve.

I ordered an old paperback and was delighted to see it was in good condition. It was as described by mab1218 and the price was very good. I was especially pleased with the service of mab1218 because I received my order in a matter of days. So it was beyond my expectation and I am a satisfied customer.