I Am Legend (1954)
3 Stars out of 5
Richard Matheson
(This short novel has a clever and ironic twist at the end.
Even setting the stage as I do in the following paragraphs there are nevertheless
a few spoilers.)
There is something to being the first to write in a
particular fantasy genre as Richard Matheson did in 1954 with “I Am Legend”.
With this book he was able to take the vampire motif introduced by Bram Stoker
with Dracula in 1897 and combine it into an apocalyptic vision of a world gone
to ruin courtesy of disease. Whether or not Matheson invented the Diseased
World Apocalypse genre or not may not be the point, as he is certainly given
the credit by many critics as the one who popularized it. Again, being first
with a popular novel on the topic has its advantages; one being that it helps
gloss over the structural flaws in the book. Perhaps, a better genre
classification for “I Am Legend” is simple pulp fiction with a twist at the end.
Matheson’s book describes the life of Robert Neville as he
tries to live out his life in the remains of Los Angeles following some kind
of nuclear exchange. While the effects of such a war were horrible in their
short term effects, their long term effects were for Neville and the other
survivors far worse. It would seem in this alternate world, one of the
lasting effects of the war is the creation of vast dust storms. Bad in and of
themselves the dust storms bring a hidden danger: contagion. This disease as
deciphered later in the book by self-taught scientist Neville is a bacterium
within the dust clouds that induces a form of vampirism. Though Matheson struggles at times to
describe the condition brought on by the disease, it evidently kills some and
then re-animates them as corpses with a taste for human blood. Oddly, it leaves
others alive but with a similar diet; some of these are sane, some not. Matheson and Neville puzzle over the
various symptoms (aversion to sunlight, garlic, mirrors, etc.) and conclude
some could be psychological and others physiological. Sorting which is which consumes
some small, early parts from this rather short novel (160 pp, more a novella than
novel), but it does give our protagonist Neville a reason to go on.
The novel opens with Neville hovering between acute alcoholism
and psychosis. When he is roughly functioning, he spends a considerable amount
of time thinking about the female vampires that lurk outside his door. Yes,
poor Robert has issues. To his credit, Matheson has tried to create a picture
of a man left alone, bereft of his wife and daughter, who must fight a daily
battle against hordes that quite literally wish to consume him. Perhaps, it
would drive just about anyone up against the wall that separates sanity from insanity.
Neville’s burden of survivor’s guilt is not his only burden. He had to watch civilization
crumble before his eyes; had to watch the authorities take his daughter’s
corpse to be burnt in a vain effort to prevent further contamination; and most
painfully, he had to find a solution for his beloved wife Virginia’s body that
did not include burning, but did include something quite nearly as shocking to
endure, let alone perform. So, Robert drinks whiskey and screams, sleeps and
ponders the wailing vampires behind his locked front door. He lacks a vision or
even a reason to go on.
Neville spends many of his sober days finding parts to
repair his vehicle and home. When he is up for it, he enters the houses near
his home and dispatches the sleeping neighbors-now-vampires. Some are the
undead and die their final death in a puff of dust, but others lay breathing in
a coma-like state. Robert drives a wooden stake through the heart of each
regardless of their dead or undead state. This is a mistake that will come to
haunt him. But in the early parts of the book, he writes off his actions as
defensive. In time, he finds such activities to be inadequate motivation to go
on. He drives to the central library near his home and begins a multi-year
study of Biology, Bacteriology, Psychology and likely a few other disciplines.
These studies not only provide Robert with a new hobby, they give author
Matheson an opportunity to create a quasi-scientific explanation for vampirism.
Robert is content, he has found an explanation for the world he lives in. (A
little weird, that a self-taught junior scientist could figure this out, while
the rest of the scientific establishment could not? Oh well, it is a fantasy.)
Robert has largely stopped drinking, but he is alone. He has
a chance with a dog that survived the first two years without getting sick, but
within a few weeks of meeting Robert, the dog sickens and dies. Alone again, Robert
sights a young woman out in the daylight. Seemingly not a vampire, Robert runs
after her and fairly roughly captures her despite her quite evident fear. He
treats her harshly; she is frightened and not aggressive. These early phases of
their relationship give good clues to the book’s title and to who Robert
really is. The book closes with a clever metaphorical and literal twist. By
the book’s end Robert slowly comes to more accurately see the world he lives in.
And he finally understands that it is he, not the vampire of old, which is the
new legend. In the final paragraphs, Matheson redeems himself and the book. He
has written a tale with a lesson on viewpoint and The Other. That he has done
so with such a weird and fantastic use of pseudo-science seems quite odd to me.
Nevertheless, the final lesson is a good one, and with such a short book as
this one, it took a slightly long walk to reach the conclusion.
This book does have a message and in the early parts of the
novel does a good job of creating a modern version of Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe.
The last “civilized” man on Earth theme is done fairly well and does engender
in the reader some thoughts as to just how one might do in such a situation.
But unlike the contemporary TV drama “The Walking Dead”, Matheson’s
story-telling does little to invoke an emotional response in the reader. His
prose might well be as disconnected from human feeling as a newspaper article.
He has a message, and his imagination is artful, but his style is inadequate to
tell a human tale, only to tell a human lesson. The lesson he writes of is an
ironic one of viewpoint and in the final analysis makes reading this book worth
the effort.
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