The Last Man

I struggled for a quarter of this book to finsih it, but had to stop just out of a sense of self-respect and self-preservatiion.

The first part of the book is ostensibly set in the 21st century, but there is absolutely no attempt to make that world more modern, futuristic or culturally different. Instead, the book slogs ponderously through the early chapters discussing a royalist vs. republican power struiggle along with a bog-standard love triangle.

The writing is so verbose, flowery and prolix it often takes a long, multi-sentence paragraph to describe one man's feelings for another man. And this happens over and over again in multiple contexts and situations. It's almost asl though the author was being paid by the word and was in desparate need of a big payday.

I couldn't justify slogging through this to the end. Probably a challenge to read two centuries ago, and utterly unreadable today.