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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fantastic Fossil!,
This review is from: Purple Cloud (Hardcover)
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.
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Every Loner's Fantasy,
This review is from: The Purple Cloud (Twelve-Point) (Hardcover)
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.
19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A post-apocalyptic tale from the early 1900s,
By Kim Boykin (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Purple Cloud (Bison Frontiers of Imagination) (Paperback)
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."
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