How a Hurried Reader Fails
My Substack's new title ... too much? Maybe a smidge. Plus, a slog of a 'Last Man' novel and a lowdown book-club hack made possible by A.I.
That series could’ve ended three seasons ago. That novel would’ve been better as a short story. That scene was two jump scares too long.
The complaint that our time is perpetually wasted by difficult storytelling is a growing one. Truth be told, I can’t shake my own impatience while inching toward the end of a very weird sci-fi novel, M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901).
Before I write about that book, allow me a moment of self-talk. That I write short essays about short stories and am criticizing the shortness of our reading attention span is a hypocrisy not lost on me. I know that “Patient Reader” is not my default setting. With The Purple Cloud, a standard length but imaginatively dense novel, I find myself in such a rush to finish but still can’t escape the muddle of its middle. Where does this pressure to “get on with it already” come from?
Captain Obvious would shrug and offer, “Need a list?”
The competitive spirit of pop-culture consumerism says you should always be first to experience an experience.
Because if you’re not, beware the Spoilers’ Siren Song calling you from the Google.
Time is finite, and a tough read eats up a lot of this precious resource.
Substack’s new writer dashboard, promising “actions to help you grow.” Sounds great! But I can’t act and grow if I don’t first read and understand, Substack. Don’t you get that my mind is dying here? Give me a tool to stop my mind from dying! (Aside: Read the comments to Substack’s announcement. The blowback is a gas.)
The emerging possibilities of generative A.I. is making us single-minded sapiens super jealous. Perhaps resistance is futile and we should assimilate with the Bing. See below.
These are all good excuses to flee a hard read, and I've fled my share. But I’m sticking with The Purple Cloud.
Shiel puts some strange spins on the “Last Man on Earth” post-apocalyptic tale. The Purple Cloud is about the first explorer to successfully reach the North Pole who, during his return home, learns that all of humanity died while he was gone. Like he left for a few months, fought like hell to survive, even killed a guy and ate bear meat, and then, BAM! Humans just perished all the sudden. Oh, and their frozen-in-time bodies won’t decay, and the newly still air smells like peach blossoms.
So many passages in this novel betray evidence of a razor-sharp creative mind. Take this mad inner-mind raving from the hero who just has broken into a London newspaper office. The dead staff members stand frozen in their final acts all around him. He’s there to read the latest news and piece together what the hell just happened.
Sometimes for two, three, four minutes, the profound interest of what I read would fix my mind, and then I would peruse an entire column, or two, without consciousness of the meaning of one single word, my brain all drawn away to the innumerable host of the wan dead that camped about me, pierced with horror lest they should start, and stand, and accuse me: for the grave and the worm was the world; and in the air a sickening stirring of cerements and shrouds; and the taste of the pale and insubstantial grey of ghosts seemed to infect my throat, and faint odours of the loathsome tomb my nostrils, and the toll of deep-toned passing-bells my ears; finally the lamp smouldered very low, and my charnel fancy teemed with the screwing-down of coffins, lych-gates and sextons, and the grating ropes that lower down the dead, and the first sound of the earth upon the lid of that strait and gloomy home of the mortal …
What begins as the hero’s quest for understanding dissolves quickly into a nightmarish vision. Conjuring up this kind of frenzied state of mind is hard for any good writer to do, much less every few pages, but Shiel manages with ease.
As you might have guessed, this prose-rich novel is filled with so many sensational things. It’s about the fin de siècle newspaper industry’s obsession with polar expeditions competing to be the first to reach the poles. It’s about the era’s growing awareness of the many possible causes for global ruin, from famine to conflict to civilization-ending natural catastrophes like an exploding Krakatoa. It’s about the pursuit of forbidden knowledge and the fear of God’s wrath. It’s about hubris. Folly. One man’s convictions changing history. And every civilization’s greatest fear: mass extinction.
The Purple Cloud is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) reimagined for 20th century audiences. A quasi-cannibal love story. P.D. James’s The Children of Men (1992) nine decades before post-apocalyptic fiction started reading like the CNN crawler. It’s a hero’s journey that ventures into the very darkest corners of psychosis and carnal desire.
Sounds like a typical “Last Man” romp, right? I should be flying through it, but I’m not. I’m wrestling with every word on every page because the biography of the real-life M.P. Shiel is a moral minefield.
There’s bad author backstory, and then there’s real bad. Shiel’s is real bad bad. There’s infidelity. Abandoned children. Abandoned lovers. Lecherous proclivities. Crime. Prosecution. Imprisonment. No apologies. Just read John Sutherland’s 2012 introduction to the Penguin Classics edition to form your own case that this talented writer was a real-life monster.
It doesn’t help Shiel’s posthumous reputation that he showed zero remorse after being convicted of “indecently assaulting and carnally knowing” a 12-year-girl, who was the daughter of a woman to whom he had recently fathered a different child and, even more recently, left! Sutherland cites the defeated view of Shiel’s “wary” friend, supernatural author Arthur Machen: “I honestly think that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ were words without meaning to him.”
Shiel lived a corruptive life mostly beyond the reaches of popular morality. He was a sick man with a superb imagination. He was a selfish philanderer and faithful devotee to literary creation.
These contradictions don’t exist to cancel each other out. Instead, they amplify one another, showing us how the sausage gets made. When we confront biographical details like the ones Sutherland and his sources offer, it is easier to see the peculiarities of The Purple Cloud as not so peculiar.
For instance, the novel has an Adam and Eve episode in it, where the near 50-year-old hero ultimately finds another survivor: a not yet 20-year-old woman. Yes, the first mindless question is: “Will they fall in love and repopulate the Earth?”
But the follow-up questions, the biographically richer ones, are better: “Really, another old guy gets the young girl storyline?” “How did this author get away with being such an unapologetic perv?” “How on earth did Shiel succeed in publishing an actual lecher’s version of hell that is arguably a thinly disguised dramatization of a sexual fantasy?” “Explain the sexual politics of a time when Oscar Wilde was jailed for two years for ‘gross indecency’ but Shiel, a ‘petty sexual criminal,’ as Sutherland termed him for his contemporaries, managed to spend eight fewer months in prison?”
These are all good questions, but better answers to them will be hard earned. Reckoning with The Purple Cloud and its maker will take time.
Maybe when I’m finished, I’ll reread this wandering essay and want to delete it for its lack of understanding. “Just cancel this creep already, Alexandyr!” Or maybe the alternating feelings of shock and awe I will feel while trying to understand this text will sharpen my thinking. Maybe I’ll find more to question. Maybe I’ll find more to say that’s even harder to put into words. Maybe I’ll see the monstrous author as irreconcilable with his gorgeous text, and that will be critically OK. Maybe the lesson I’ll learn is that some authors’ biographies should never be allowed to die, because it’s Shiel’s moral thorniness that gives his work its lasting sting. Many of his meanings are awful to ponder, sure. But useful knowledge is often gained from interrogating terrible things.
So back to my original rant about the pitfalls of a hurried mind. When a great text tells you to slow down, slow down. Resist the rush to understand. Imaginative exploration, when it’s part of your leisure life, should not be cut short by a deadline. It takes a lot of time, at least for me, to get my thoughts in order about troublesome stories like The Purple Cloud. There is nothing wrong with reading a sentence or chapter or a biography twice or thrice or four times. The more rumination, the better.
In reading and stopping and rereading, we’re not meant to quickly quantify meaning. Instead, we are slowly shaping and refining it. Asking ourselves why we judge. If we judge rightly. If approaching a text based on obvious standards of morality is a well-rounded critical approach. Or, if there are more criteria necessary to understanding why greatness often lurks within a monster’s shadow.
I’m not the only one going “Face to Face with Culture’s Monsters,” as Claire Dederer is doing in Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023). In the link above, reviewer Alexandra Jacobs even wrestles with how she agrees and disagrees with Dederer’s takes. This is so meta and so much more valuable. Jacobs concludes (spoiler alert): “But, but … this is a book that looks boldly down the cliff at the roiling waters below and jumps right in, splashes around playfully, isn’t afraid to get wet. How refreshing.”
It’s obvious I need to read Monsters after The Purple Cloud!
For the time being, I hope a more patient approach to Shiel and Sutherland’s insights will guide me to safer waters. To get there, I will first have to navigate the hero’s pyromania phase and the author’s God delusion that are stirring up some serious shit in the pages ahead.
Cover image: detail from illustration by Yuko Shimizu featured on the cover of Penguin Classics’ 2012 edition of The Purple Cloud.
Shiel sounds WIIIIILD 😳