The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel: the last man on Earth

The Purple Cloud is a 1901 novel by M. P. Shiel, and it is one of the first and strangest of the last-man-on-Earth stories. A polar explorer comes home from the North Pole to find that a cloud has killed every living thing on the planet, and that he is the only person left. It is a Victorian novel about solitude and madness, and it still reads like almost nothing else.

The idea behind it

The premise is the reason the book survives. Adam Jeffson reaches the North Pole, and on the way back he notices a purple cloud spreading across the sky and a sweet, peach-like smell. Then he starts finding dead animals with no marks on them, then dead crews on dead ships, then a dead world. The cloud has done in days what no war or plague has ever managed.

Shiel uses that setup for something much more interesting than disaster. Most of the novel is not about the cloud at all. It is about what one person becomes when there is no one left to be decent for. Jeffson does not grieve for long. He crowns himself, dresses as an emperor, burns cities for the pleasure of watching them fall, and spends seventeen years building an enormous golden palace to his own glory. The book is a study of solitude turning into madness, and it is far more unsettling than the apocalypse that caused it.

The story, spoiler-light

The novel opens with the polar expedition and the race to the Pole, and it is worth knowing one piece of plotting going in: Jeffson’s place on the ship was secured by a crime committed on his behalf, and the book never lets him forget it. He reaches the Pole, meets something he cannot explain, and comes home to a world that has already ended.

From there the novel follows him across a dead Europe and America and into the long middle section where he loses himself. He finds a notebook in the house of a dead writer, and it is there that he starts to write down what happened. The last part of the book introduces a second person, and changes the question from how to die alone into how to begin again, which is a much stranger and more hopeful turn than the opening suggests.

Shiel never explains the cloud, and the novel is better for it. It is a phenomenon rather than a puzzle, and the book is not interested in a mechanism.

What makes it science fiction

It is a scientific romance, the term the period used for what we now call science fiction, and it comes from the same years as the early work of H. G. Wells. Wells himself called the novel brilliant, and H. P. Lovecraft later held it up as an example of what weird fiction could do. Both of them are describing the same quality: the book is not interested in the science of the cloud, but in the loneliness of being the one person left.

Its place in the genre is foundational. The Purple Cloud is one of the earliest novels to take the end of humanity seriously as a subject rather than as a moral lesson, and almost every last-man story since has been in its debt. It also stands near the head of a tradition of British disaster fiction that runs through John Wyndham and well beyond him.

Who should read it, and who should give it a miss

• Read it if you are interested in where the post-apocalyptic novel comes from.
• Read it if you like the idea of a Victorian writer taking on the end of the world and going strange with it.
• Read it if you want a short classic rather than a modern doorstopper.
• Give it a miss if period prose wears you down. This is an Edwardian novel and it reads like one.
• Give it a miss if you want a plot with momentum. The middle section is deliberately aimless, because the character is.
• Give it a miss if you need the central phenomenon explained. Shiel never explains it.

Where to start, and what to read next

The novel is in the public domain, so you can read it for free, and there are two texts to know about. The 1901 original is the longest and is generally preferred. Shiel revised the book in 1929, mostly tightening the prose, and that revision became the most commonly reprinted version. The Penguin Classics edition uses the 1901 text with an introduction by John Sutherland, and there are free editions from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks.

If you want the same territory with more control, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids is the obvious next step, and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man is the earlier ancestor. If you want the modern version of the idea, the shelves are full of it, and this is one of the books that started it.

One note for a modern reader: the book’s attitudes, particularly to the woman Jeffson finds near the end, are those of 1901, and they show. That is worth knowing in advance, and it does not change what the novel achieves.

The verdict

A genuinely strange and genuinely influential book. The apocalypse is only the setup; the novel is really about what a person becomes with nobody left to answer to, and it goes to places a modern disaster novel usually avoids. It is uneven, dated in places and far slower than its premise suggests, and it is still one of the most original novels of its era.

Frequently asked questions

When was The Purple Cloud published?

It was first published in 1901, by Chatto & Windus in London. M. P. Shiel revised it in 1929, tightening the prose without changing the story.

Is it free to read?

Yes. The novel is in the public domain, and free editions are available from Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks, with a public domain audiobook at LibriVox.

Which edition should I read?

The 1901 text is the one most readers prefer. The Penguin Classics edition uses it, with an introduction by John Sutherland, and it is the most reliable modern print version.

Was it ever filmed?

Yes, loosely. It was the basis for the 1959 film The World, the Flesh and the Devil, which takes the central situation and reshapes it considerably.