I love Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, so this has been on my to-read list for a while now. I can't deny it was a slog. I admire the attempt and the scale and the willingness to knock off character after character... But I confess. By page 100, I was hoping for the plague to hurry up and arrive so that these melodramatic twits would die off.

It happened, eventually, but not nearly quickly enough. The first quarter to a third of the book could have been cut to no real loss. Instead, the pace is glacial, the language overwrought, and the characters, most of them, could have done with a damn good slap. They were histrionic drama llamas before the plague got to them, and the purple prose - more constant than infection - made me somehow even less sympathetic to their struggles. One of the contemporary reviews (from 1826) which is reprinted at the back of the book says that The Last Man is characterised by "morbid affectation", and you know what, it's not wrong.

There's the potential for a good story under the weight of all this hysteria, and every so often glimmers of it shines through. For the most part, however: I have read this once, and once is enough.