Back to Methuselah isn’t one of George Bernard Shaw’s most famous or most beloved works. It’s certainly, however, one of his most ambitious and least accessible works. Given that it has the subtitle of “A Metabiological Pentateuch,” it’ll probably not be surprising when I say that it is not exactly a rollicking good time. It opens with a very long prologue in which Shaw kind of lays out his philosophy of creative evolution, which posits a quasi-intelligent process of evolution that is leading humanity to its xenith and, naturally, isn’t finished yet. The “Back to Methuselah” concept that Shaw’s building up to is that eventually humanity is going to evolve to having much longer lifespans, much like the Biblical patriarchs, lifespans that might even stretch into the hundreds of years. This would be to enable humanity to achieve greater levels of maturity before we die which would eventually lead to a utopian society. It’s hard to tell exactly how serious Shaw is about this concept, whether he really does think something like this is going to happen or if he’s being more satirical. Regardless, he’s written a “Pentateuch,” ie. a collection of five books/plays to explore the idea.
Let me just run down very quickly what these five “books” are, just so you’ll get some idea of how gonzo this thing really is. In the Beginning takes place in and around the Garden of Eden and features Adam, Eve, the Serpent and Cain as characters. The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas takes place in Shaw’s “present day,” ie. the 1920s and features a couple of philosophers who have figured out this whole “eventually evolution towards longevity” thing and are trying to convince people of it. The Thing Happens takes place in the early 2100s and details the time when this evolution has begun and there are a very few people living to extreme ages. Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman takes place 1,000 years later and revolves around the clashing perspectives of the very old and the very young. As Far As Thought Can Reach, the final “book,” takes place 31,000 years in the future when human beings are hatched from eggs. The less said about that nonsense the better. Books two and three are the best of the bunch; they have the only really interesting characters and Shaw’s satirical voice is very present in those sections. The farther he gets into the concept, the weirder things get, understandably, and, books four & five just get progressively worse until, by the time I was about ten pages from the end, I was incredibly irritated at how stupid it all was.
Here's the twist though. Shaw says in the Afterword that he believes Back to Methuselah is his finest work. Well, it’s not. It’s, taken as a whole, pretty bad. But he makes the case that it’s going to be the only one of his works to truly stand the test of time (which is funnier than anything in the play itself) and that it is either “a World Classic or nothing.” Well, I know which way I’m voting. But this is what happens when you’re George Bernard Shaw and you just can’t quite get rid of that tiny bit of disdain for your commercial work. But even Shaw was shocked when someone decided to try to actually stage this disaster; he’d intended it to be read and it was written as a play only because that was the style he was most comfortable in. So it was staged as basically an art piece and, since the entire play clocks in at around 500 closely-set pages, it was probably about eight hours and the last good bit was probably about five hours in. So, while this play can’t exactly deliver on increasing your lifespan to hundreds of years, it can certainly make it SEEM like an afternoon at the theater has lasted for centuries. Anyway, if you’re into Shaw as a writer, it’s probably worth reading this just because it’s so damn weird and quite unique in his body of work. Otherwise, it has its pleasures, but a fair amount of tedium as well; whether the weirdness eventually ends up in one camp or the other is probably a matter of taste. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – weird sci-fi/fantasy epic is Shaw’s most ambitious and strangest work and might be worth reading for that alone; unfortunately, it’s also fairly tedious and far too long. 2 ½ stars.