This is one of the dullest
and most tedious books I have ever read. Which is a shame to say, as I really
enjoyed the other of Jules Verne’s works I've encountered: Around
the World in Eighty Days. Alas Twenty-Thousand
Leagues Under the Sea is significantly less enjoyable, for in terms of
plot, pace, characters and readability we are left severely wanting. Imagine,
if you will, being trapped on a submarine for a month where your only companion
is a man who absolutely will not stop talking about marine biology. This in
essence was my experience of the book.
Our protagonist, M. Pierre Aronnax, is a mid-19th
century French marine biologist who tells us about some queer occurrences in
the waters around the world. Global shipping has been attacked by some bizarre
gigantic sea-creature, and as an expert on the matter (or the closest thing
they can find) M. Aronnax is offered a chance to accompany the hunt for this
mysterious monster. Bringing with him his dull and subservient man-servant,
Conseil, and befriending the Canadian harpooner Ned Land, Aronnax and his two
companions find themselves flung off their ship during an encounter with the
creature, only to be rescued by self-same creature and learn that it is not, in
actuality, a sea-monster at all. What they discover is nothing less than a
gigantic submarine, entirely self-sufficient and powered by technological
marvels. Its captain, the enigmatic Captain Nemo, treats the three men as his
guests and takes them along on a spectacular underwater journey – with the
caveat that they are never allowed to leave his custody again.
Such then is the premise of the story. After this point,
about sixty pages into the novel, we get nothing more really than a series of
episodes stitched together into a non-stop voyage that takes the characters all
across the globe. We go off into an underwater hunt in an underwater forest,
get beached near an island of hostile native tribesmen, go treasure-seeking among sunken shipwrecks, battle sperm-whales
and giant squids, discover the ruins of Atlantis, and cruise all the way to the
South Pole. Aside from this nothing much actually happens; we learn nothing
really of Captain Nemo and his fabulous craft beyond what he spends the first
few chapters explaining in non-stop exposition, so the suspense and mystery of
Nemo’s origins leave us frustrated and dissatisfied rather than intrigued. Of
the other characters nothing much can be said. The Nautilus' crew are a
bunch of faceless voiceless zombies, Conseil is Aronnax’s skulking unemotional
sycophant and Ned Land is a whining carnivorous brute. As for Aronnax, our eyes
into this supposedly fascinating under-water world, he is quite simply the
dullest man we could hope to spend our time with. He definitely enjoys this
captive journey he finds himself on, but at our expense – for he spends fully
half the novel describing, or rather ‘classifying’, all the supposedly amazing
life-forms and marvels he witnesses under the waves. Descriptions are brief and
fleeting; but Latinized scientific names for species and genus are thrown
around as if there were no tomorrow for this obsessively zoological
imperialistic* dullard. Verne must have written this book with a good number of
encyclopaedias open in front of him, and if he had concentrated on trying to
write an interesting story to accompany this bewildering array of scientific
facts then it might have enhanced its overall effect. As it is we just end up
with a solid brick of tedious details, and even the odd squid-attack, iceberg
collapse or jaunt on the ocean floor cannot alleviate the abject dullness that
permeates the entire novel.
Anything good to say about this book? Well, even though it
makes you feel like an idiot, at least it doesn’t exactly treat you as one.
Aronnax is speaking to an intellectual equal, and if you can resist his
scientific jargon for any length of time then you might feel that you really
are on an under-water Victorian journey of intellectual discovery. The Nautilus
itself is, even today, quite an interesting setting; an entirely
self-sufficient luxury submarine equipped with, among other attractions, a
library and a museum. Nemo and his world are at least relatively
interesting, though I would have preferred it had the secrets of the Nautilus and of
Nemo been gradually revealed throughout the course of the novel, rather than
been explained in a massive chunk near the beginning and then left
pretty much unexplained for the remainder of the story.
I sympathize with the character of Ned Land, unable to
appreciate Aronnax’s marine lectures or else find anything really to entertain
himself on board the Nautilus, for his only desire is to escape the confines of
this peculiar prison-ship and cut short his underwater voyage by any means necessary. I
particularly don’t like the faceless crew, who play no part in the story other
than to serve Nemo without question – which I find somehow ironic as Nemo
considers himself to be all about freedom from man and battling oppression, yet
he remains in absolute, total control of the destiny of every last person on
board his ship. These people are essentially enslaved in order that one man can
carry out his insane wishes, unable as they are to leave the ship, doomed to
follow their commander even when he puts all their lives in terrible danger – driving
into the iceberg-clogged seas of Antarctica, wading in to do battle with giant tentacle-spewing
monstrosities, or taking on armed warships because he sometimes feels cranky. And that’s nothing to say of the lack of women on board. Perhaps
Nemo is happy to live a celibate life – it is part of his character, after all –
but throughout the entire novel there is not a single female character
anywhere. It’s almost as though women have been excluded from this boys’ own
adventure, and the absence is most glaring amongst this all-male crew. Just
seems fishy, is all.
So as it is, Twenty
Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is a long, tedious novel in which nothing
much happens. While undoubtedly something of a classic, and a
point of interest in the 19th century imagination, overall I gained
little pleasure out of having read it. I hear that Nemo’s origins are explained
in Verne’s 1874 book The Mysterious
Island, but I care little enough to read it now. If you want a book to delve
into, then unless you’re willing to be lectured on marine biology jargon over
the next three to four weeks, find something else to peruse.
* One must stress that
this is a novel from the 19th century, and as far as European-Victorian
attitudes go M. Aronnax keeps his bigotry to a minimum, except for his jarring
distinctions between ‘civilised’ and ‘un-civilised’ human-beings. His tendency
to refer to the indigenous peoples of south-east Asia as ‘savages’ gets rather
wearisome after a while, and the scene in which the Nautilus is besieged by these
self-same ‘savages’ shows that attitudes have progressed some way over the
past 146 years.
Bibliolitus
Verne, Jules. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Translated
by Philip Schuyler Allen. London: Reader’s Digest. (1993 [First published in
French in 1870])
No comments:
Post a Comment