Is it any good?

Which is the first thing we all ask when a friend recommends a book. Closely followed by a quizzical: ‘So what’s it all about then?’

M P Shiel's literary reputation is largely based on his 1901 novel The Purple Cloud and it’s a novel which packs quite a punch: extremely engaging, utterly mad and entirely intriguing, I defy anyone not to be seduced by its weirdness. And as for the author, well he’s every bit as strange as his creation. Now mostly remembered (more on that later) for his one big book, MP was PP (pretty prolific), despite being ostensibly PT (pretty torn) between wanting to produce high art and needing to earn a living! Mmm, aren’t we all. Fortunately for us this tension in his work makes things very interesting.

Was Shiel really a racist?

Born and educated in the West Indies, Shiel moved to England in 1885, and influenced by Edgar Allan POE, began to be published. Judging by his early work you’d certainly be forgiven for thinking that he had an unhealthy obsession with the colour yellow (a colour which in times past has associations as a racist metaphor, one depicting the peoples of East and Southeast Asia as an existential danger to the West. And despite his being an author of mixed heritage, this cultural appropriation of western value systems remains potentially problematic. How so, I hear you ask? Well, The Yellow Danger was published in 1898, The Yellow Wave in 1905, and The Yellow Peril in 1911. The Yellow Danger appears an opportunistic attempt to trade on public interest in the Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901… and seems to confirm his fictional portrayal of Chinese hostility to the West. That said, Shiel himself considered the novel a hack work and appeared embarrassed by its success. It did prove influential amongst his peers though and is thought to have influenced another of our Quite Literary inclusions, H G WELLS.

The Yellow Wave is a historical novel about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 via a retelling of Romeo and Juliet with the warring nations’ leading families standing in for the feuding Capulets and Montagues. While The Yellow Peril is set in the Chinese Revolution of 1911–1912, but unlike ‘Danger’ failed to spark the public interest. It is notable mainly for the fact of its predicting, like the hero of its story, Shiel’s decade-long departure from novel writing.

The Purple Cloud

In 1898 Shiel married Carolina Garcia Gomez and soon after conceived both a child and another mini-miracle, The Purple Cloud! The protagonist of his haunting post-apocalyptic novel is a deeply flawed young man named Adam Jeffson, who, after enduring gruelling conditions and near-death experiences on a solo expedition to the North Pole, returns to discover a mysterious purple cloud has obliterated all life on earth except for his. Part of a future-history science fiction series, this book is demonstrative of the speculative, philosophical impulse that pervades all of Shiel's work. It engages with Victorian developments in the (unusually for the time, actual, and not pseudo-) sciences of geology and biology, despite a tendency to focus on their dark sides, i.e., geological cataclysm and racial ‘decline’. While ultimately presenting us with a positive (if pretty unorthodox) perspective on the natural (or religious, depending on your viewpoint) phenomenon of catastrophe.

First Man.

In the story, our post-apocalyptic ‘first man’ Adam embarks on a journey across the world, encountering new (and now lost) civilizations while struggling to come to terms with his isolation and newfound power as the last human on earth. He finds that setting fire to things helps. Cities swiftly becoming his flammable material of choice.

Setting cities on fire seemed to help.

This beguiling novel explores larger themes of morality and the fragility of humanity, with Adam’s complex character struggling with the weight of his responsibility as the last surviving member of his species. He grapples with the idea of what it means to be human and the importance of preserving life, even in the face of despair and hopelessness. And it is through his journey that Shiel successfully examines the depths of human emotion and the potential limits of our ability to survive in a hostile world.

Spoiler Alert - stop now if you intend to read the novel! 

Adam’s discovery of his Eve, Leda, is a pivotal moment in the novel. For far from merely providing ‘love interest’, Leda is the epitome of that modern cliché, the ‘strong, independent woman’. She acts as a painful reminder of what has been lost (his fiancée Alice Langham appears briefly at the beginning of the novel) but is so unique herself as to completely upstage our hero at times. As Adam travels the world, he encounters pockets of survivors who have managed to escape the effects of the purple cloud. When Adam discovers that Leda is living with a man named Henry Mortimer this discovery is a turning point in his emotional journey, as he struggles to come to terms with the fact that the woman he loves can survive without him.

Death and the Maiden.

Leda's presence in the novel serves as a reminder of all that they have lost and the connections that they’ve been forced to leave behind. Her character highlights the importance of love and companionship in a world that has been stripped of all other forms of life. Above all, Leda adds depth and emotional resonance to Shiel’s tale of woe. Their relationship provides us with a window into the characters’ inner turmoil and serves as a reminder of the emotional toll of survival in a world devoid of all other forms of life.

Oooh, Pyromania

Speaking of which, Adam turns to burning down cities because of his despair at discovering that he is the last surviving human on earth. He at first attempts to maintain a sense of normalcy, but as he travels further and further, and sees the extent of the purple cloud's devastation, his realization of the full extent of the catastrophe destabilises him. And so, his burning of cities, rather than merely preventing disease, is a manifestation of his despair and anger at the situation he finds himself in. He sees the ruins of the cities as a testament to the failure of human civilization and the futility of his own efforts to survive. As the novel progresses, his mental state continues to deteriorate, and he becomes more and more destructive, leading to (another spoiler alert!) tragic consequences for both him and the world around him. Ultimately, the burning of cities serves as a powerful metaphor for the destructive nature of despair and the devastating impact it can have on the human psyche.

A cloud hanging over him. 

And what a cloud! It was discovered in 2008 that Shiel had been imprisoned in 1914 for ‘indecently assaulting and carnally knowing’ his 12-year-old stepdaughter. Unrepentant, Shiel served sixteen months hard labour in prison, complaining to the then Home Secretary about what he perceived as an unfair law (though he assured his publisher that he had been treated well). Shiel's defence of his crime is seen by some as disingenuous; with Shiel referring to ‘love-toyings’, with an ‘older girl on the cusp of maturity’. Worse than this, Shiel fails to mention that he had known both the girl and her mother's sisters long before his conviction, perhaps intimately, as contemporary letters from one of the sisters to Shiel suggest. Unsurprisingly, his appeal against conviction was unsuccessful. The case was reported in The Vote, a weekly women's suffrage newspaper, on 4 December 1914 and states that the ‘case was remarkable for the philosophical discussions on sex’ by Shiel who conducted his own defence.

This all begs the question of whether Shiel can have a literary legacy. Critics argue that young heroines abound in his novels, where they are romanticised, idealised, and sexualised by the male gaze. In 1919, Shiel married again, but was separated from Esther Lydia Jewson a decade later. This separation was supposedly precipitated by Shiel's sexual interest in and possible abuse of Esther Lydia's young female relatives, however, this is open to dispute as they did not divorce and Shiel continued to live close to Esther Lydia's home in West Sussex.

That Legacy

Shiel dabbled in radical politics and spent most of his last decade working on a ‘truer’ translation of the Gospel of Luke. Half of the completed final draft was lost after his death in Chichester in 1947. On his death (at 81), his friend John Gawsworth became his literary executor, and is supposed to have kept Shiel’s ashes ‘in a biscuit tin on the mantelpiece, putting a pinch in the stew for special guests’. How true that is is anyone’s guess, however it does seem appropriate considering the strangeness that surrounded Shiel throughout his life.

Matthew Phipps Shiel published 25 novels and various collections of short stories, essays, and poems, most of which have now been forgotten. The Purple Cloud remains his best known and most reprinted novel. It has been variously described as both a neglected masterpiece and the best of all Last Man novels. I certainly found great comfort in it during a time of loss, and would highly recommend it.