Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

...even though marine science and geology have passed it by.

Captain Nemo is compelling and mysterious as ever, if the passengers are rather broadly drawn (at least all three of them are distinct) and the crew is more or less faceless. (Aside from Nemo, the crew doesn’t speak to the passengers, so they’re never able to pick up the Nautilus’ private language.)

And Verne has really thought things through. Like, how did Nemo get something of this scale built without someone noticing? He farmed out different parts and systems to different factories scattered across the world. Ocean-based textiles, undersea mines, an isolated source of fuel that no surface-based ship will find.

Even the parts where he made up oceanography out of whole cloth, like the deeper outflow throgh Gibraltar (which as it turns out does exist, but not for the reasons Nemo suggests, which have since been found to be incorrect) or the open sea at the south pole (which doesn’t) – or Atlantis, for that matter, with the Canaries as the remnants of the sunken peaks – have at least some logic beyond the rule of cool.

I read an abridged version years ago, when I was in my early teens, and I’ve been meaning to read the whole thing ever since. I’m glad I finally got around to it! Though I suspect a lot of the abridgment had to do with the frequent (and lengthy) lists of fish.

Now I need to finally read The Mysterious Island…

A classic adventure tale cataloging every fish, seaweed, and coral in the various oceans. Some of them are real.

As adventure tales go, particularly from this classic era, it's pretty good. I read it as a young teen and remember it fondly, although perhaps my fondness comes from the Classics Illustrated comic as much as from the actual text.

In honesty, it doesn't bear up as well as I'd hoped. Nemo's unexplored misandry against the M. Arronax's relentless intellectualism left me with too little satisfaction to give the story more than four stars.

Recommended, if only for the picture of what early science fiction looked like post-Frankenstein and pre-War of the Worlds.

I re-read (or just read) this classic recently, because a song from the 1970 audio story with Jean Gabin was in loop in my head for whatever reason. I thought I'd finally remember who was really the Captain Nemo and what happened to him. Alas, Jules Verne was more interested in fish naming than in backstory. Oh well, still an excellent classic full of cool fishes and visionary science.

Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is an incredible read that tells the tale of many fascinating characters but is told from the perspective of Pierre Aronnax, a professor of Marine Biology who along with his loyal assistant, Conseil is tasked with finding a monster who is causing havoc beneath the waves. A monster that seems able to travel faster than any marine inhabitant that Aronnax has encountered and his curiosity is spiked and his ego fit to burst to be known as the man who found the anomaly. But of course, things do not go to plan and everything Aronnax, Conseil and the hunter, Ned Land have known when they sink beneath the waves turns out to be wrong and they see the world anew.

The Nautilus becomes their new prison and Verne's creation sounds incredible and truly shows just how ahead of his time he was with his ideas and concepts of what is possible in his tales. It's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that also tells me that a man who would pass away in 1905 had an almost impossible ability to see what we would do to this planet and what we would need to survive due to his fictional creations. I would love to see the Nautilus come to life just to see what Verne's ideas would look like because the descriptions in this tale are so vivid and imaginative.

Aronnax, Conseil and Ned Land's encounter with the enigmatic Captain Nemo is unsettling and whilst they are surrounded by wonders that many of their counterparts wouldn't believe, the three are wary and I found myself torn between loving Nemo for his imagination and ways of seeing the world or rather those on land and wanting to shake him and demand he free these men who have unwittingly found themselves at his mercy. After all, the Nautilus may have everything you could want but they were still at his mercy and Nemo seems to balance on a knife-edge with his moods.

I cannot help but imagine Jules Verne researching so much before writing this classic tale that initially was serialised in a French periodical so that he was able to blend the fiction with the factual and legend seamlessly - something that Verne does perfectly. It's a tale of adventure, of disillusionment, of loss, mystery and Verne gives us a book that has lasted from 1870 and I don't think Nemo and his love of the Ocean are going anywhere. I just wish I had re-read it sooner as the last time I did I was a child and so much went over my head.

To imagine travelling so far around the world and remain for the most part beneath the waves sounds incredible and perhaps it's my lifelong love of the ocean and swimming but I would have loved to be upon the Nautilus.

Nemo deserves so much more than he has, and I do think it's sad to not have Verne explore more about how his tragedy had shaped Nemo as a man as we only see glimpses near the end of the book and it almost feels too little too late to fully understand just why Nemo has lost his faith in humanity.

One can only imagine how Jules Verne would react to how much people still love his writing, his imagination and the characters he gave us.