BOOK REVIEW: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

TITLE: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

AUTHOR: Jules Verne

PUBLISHER: Puffin Classics

INITIAL DATE: 1870

DATE OF EDITION: 1986

Usually, when choosing books to review here, I tend to lean more towards “cheap genre trash” than “timeless works of classic literature”. Partially that’s because of my own tastes, partially because when I do read a work of real literature, I don’t necessarily feel like I have anything interesting to say about it. It’s fitting then, that while today we tackle one of the Classics, it’s also a piece of genre trash. Twenty Thousand Leagues is a great book, and one that’s been hugely influential, inspiring many other books, movies, comics, and other works of art, but it’s also an adventure story, churned out by an author seeking to entertain and amuse his audience more than anything else. But if there’s one thing I hope people can learn from my literary musings on here, it’s that there’s almost always something of value you can glean from a book, no matter how commercial its origin, and this is no exception. I first read Twenty Thousand Leagues when I was a child, along with a number of other Verne “voyages extraordinaires” stories (I was going to say that this was a common trend for kids to go through but, honestly, is it anymore?) but this one stuck with me in a way that Around the World in Eighty Days or From the Earth to the Moon didn’t, and I’ve returned to it countless time since. Let’s talk about why.

BACKGROUND:

Professor Aronnax sets out on an expedition to help rid the seas of a mysterious monster bedeviling the world’s shipping lanes, but imagine his surprise when he discovers that the “monster” they are seeking is in fact a magnificent submarine! Taken captive by the enigmatic Captain Nemo, Aronnax and his companions set out an extraordinary journey beneath the ocean, delving into depths never before seen by man. But what drives this mysterious man? What has driven him from the world of men? And does he have some sinister purpose beyond simple scientific discovery?

WHAT I LIKED:

1. I described this above as an “adventure story”, and at its heart, that’s what the book is. It’s about a bunch of dudes sailing around the ocean and having adventures! They discover the South Pole, they visit Atlantis, they fight a shark, they get shipwrecked (submarinewrecked?) twice, they fight some giant squids, all good, clean fun. The book itself is sort of meandering, without much of a narrative superstructure after Professor Aronnax & Co. are captured. Captain Nemo tells them they’re going to explore the marvels of the world’s oceans, and they proceed to do that for the next several hundred pages, traveling across the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, Atlantic, Antarctica, and Arctic seas, until they finally manage to escape. Like a lot of 19th century books, Twenty Thousand Leagues was originally serialized in a magazine, the Magasin D’Education et de Récréation, and it’s not hard to tell. It’s very episodic, with each chapter including some fun adventures to keep you entertained until next week. But while I enjoy all this nautical nonsense, it’s not what makes the book so memorable.

2. Though not the narrator or the protagonist of the novel—arguably, he is the antagonist—Captain Nemo is the fulcrum around which Twenty Thousand Leagues turns, and the aspect of the book that I think is most responsible for its enduring success. Certainly, he was always what interested me most, and remains one of my favorite characters. Nemo is a character painted almost in entirely in superlatives and hyperbole; he is a “genius of the sea!”, a “savant!”, a “a judge, an executioner!” He is a Romantic character in the 18th century definition of the word, a man driven and defined by intense emotion, a man so disgusted by the foibles and follies of Mankind that he chose to turn his back on the surface and seek out a new life free of all constraint or strictures. You find yourself drawn to him as if by a magnetic compass, this man of fiery passion and cold hatred, this man who dares to defy all the conventions and regulations of the world if they transgress against his conscience. He is written like a force of nature, a phenomenon that can only be negotiated or navigated, never mastered. And yet, beneath the brilliance and self-possession, Nemo is achingly human, and throughout the narrative, Arronax is struck by the contrast between the different aspects of the man; the explorer, cataloging different species of fish, the avenger, pitilessly sinking enemy warships, the inventor, plumbing new depths of scientific inquiry, and the man weeping before the picture of his lost family, crying “Enough! God, enough!”

3. If Nemo were just the enigma suggested by his name, he might be a shallow or boring character, but throughout the book he displays a consistent political outlook and vision, one that he labors in service of. Early in the book, our narrator is attacked by Papuan natives while exploring a small island. When he attempts to warn Nemo, the captain merely replies “Savages? And you are astonished, professor, that having set foot on one of the lands of this globe, you find savages? Where are there no savages? Besides, those you call savages, are they worse than others? For my part, sir, I have met with some everywhere.” A few chapters later, Captain Nemo rescues a Ceylonese fisherman from a shark, and gifts him a priceless sack of pearls. When Arronax comments on this, Nemo replies “That Indian, professor, is an inhabitant of an oppressed country, and I am, and until my last breath shall be, the same.” Further one, we see that this is not just a matter of words to him, when we learn that he’s been funneling shipwreck gold to revolutionaries and freedom fighters around the world, and seeking out and sinking warships belonging to a particular nation that he despises. What this narrative strand does is take Nemo’s antipathy to mankind and transform it from a simple matter of personal ego into a coherent worldview, one built upon principles and beliefs, taken to the upmost extreme.

_{Alphonse de Neuville, The Voyages of Captain Nemo}

4. Throughout this post thus far, I’ve alluded to Nemo’s backstory and motivations without actually explaining them. That is because, in Twenty Thousand Leagues, none of that is ever really explained. There’s a reason for that! Originally, Verne planned to have it revealed that Nemo was a Polish nobleman who had fled his country’s oppression by the Russian Empire. However, Verne’s publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, vetoed this, given that at the time, France and Russia were allies. Instead, the book leaves Nemo’s origins a mystery. Several years later, Verne wrote a sort of spinoff/sequel called The Mysterious Island, in which Nemo is revealed to be (SPOILERS for a book published in 1875?) an Indian rajah named Prince Dakkar, who had fled beneath the waves after his family died in the 1857 Indian Mutiny. This is an interesting revelation, and I do like that it retroactively makes Twenty Thousand Leagues about an anti-imperialist Indian revolutionary, but I do think that preserving the mystery improves the original book considerably. Throughout the novel, Nemo is presented as an enigmatic, unknowable figure, one driven by pressures and commitments that we can’t understand. It’s part of what makes him so captivating.

5. But in addition to the wonderful strangeness of Captain Nemo’s character and the fun of an old-fashioned adventure story, a lot of what makes this book so enjoyable is just the delight in the design of lots and lots of clever little gadgets. Much of the joy of Science Fiction—and if Jules Verne isn’t SciFi, he’s certainly one of the genre’s forerunners—can be found in the simple act of thinking of a really cool machine and telling people about it, and there’s a lot of that in here. Except for the opening few chapters and the last two pages, the entirety of Twenty Thousand Leagues takes place in or around the Nautilus, Nemo’s extraordinary submarine, and Verne spends a lot of time, and clearly has a lot of fun, showing it off to his readers. Published in 1870, when submarines were still in their infancy, Twenty Thousand Leagues is free to speculate wildly, sometimes coming close to the truth, sometimes not, but there’s just something so enjoyable about watching the mental process of design, of seeing how all the pieces fit together to form this marvelous machine, and to imagine how it might work, or what it might look like.

6. So, fun fact, I actually kind of hate the ocean? It’s big and scary and wet and full of sharks. No thank you! I’ll stay here on dry land, where I can breathe. Which might make it a little bit weird that I love this book so much, but Verne manages to convince you that living in a tin can underneath a billion gallons of shark-filled water would actually be fun, and perhaps even spiritually fulfilling. In Twenty Thousand Leagues, the sea serves as a central metaphor, representing the freedom that Nemo so desperately seeks.

Yes, I love it. The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert where man is never alone, for he feels life quivering around him on every side. The sea does not belong to despots. On its surface iniquitous rights can still be exercised, men can fight there, devour each other there, and transport all terrestrial horrors there. But at thirty feet below its level their power ceases, their influence dies out, their might disappears. Ah sir, live in the bosom of the waters! There alone is independence! There I recognize no masters! There I am free!

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, pg. 54

It paints a picture of the world-ocean as a land beyond the reach of tyrants, where people can still live as they choose, amongst the glories and splendors of the natural world, a sort of nautical eco-anarchist-humanist philosophy of the human soul. It manages to thematically merge the radical political message of the novel with Verne’s more famous skill as a writer, his ability to inculcate a sense of awe and wonder in the reader. Throughout the book, while his companions are obsessed with plotting an escape, Professor Arronax is torn between his desire to return to his home and his fascination with the marvels of the ocean that he is now able to study firsthand. Verne draws you into that sense of amazement, and it’s effective even on a committed hydrophobe like myself.

7. What makes it difficult to really sum up what makes this book so great is that, at its heart, it’s about a feeling, more than anything else. Put aside the plot, and the characters, and the cool submarine, and the radical anti-imperialist politics, and what makes this book so appealing is the sense of having a space that belongs to you, that you totally control, where you live life by your own cleverness and wit without the gainsay of anyone else. The Nautilus is a world unto itself, her crew gathers their clothes, food, and supplies from the ocean, it generates its electrical power from the seawater, it is filled with the treasures and scientific marvels gathered from the ocean floor by Nemo and his companions. It has the same attraction that castaway novels do, I think, the pleasure in imagining rebuilding a miniature civilization, all by yourself. Combined, perhaps, with the sense of hiding under your covers and pretending to be asleep when your parents come into your room. Strange though it may sound, it’s very comforting.

WHAT I DON’T LIKE:

1. A lot of the science in the book has since been disproved or superseded (for example, the depiction of the South Pole is extremely outdated) so if that matters to you, be warned I guess? Personally, it doesn’t bother me much.

2. Not exactly a criticism, but while I was researching this piece, I discovered that the Puffin Classics edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues that I grew up with is pretty heavily abridged, cutting out a lot of scientific (or “scientific”) discussion and digressions into natural philosophy. I can’t argue with the result, but I’d be interested to read a more complete edition at some point.

WILL YOU LIKE IT:

If you like reading at all, you should read this book. It’s not very long, it’s very influential on the fiction that came since, and it’s a genuinely very engaging read. I read Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea when I was a child, and I was enthralled right away, and it still retains much of its magic when I return to it today. It’s a fun, adventurous story that draws you in and hits you with the emotional pile driver of Nemo, one of the most memorable characters I’ve ever encountered. It takes you on a magical journey beneath the sea, and then meditates on how the oppression of mankind corrupts everything it touches, and whether or not you can truly escape that curse. It’s full of scientific facts about the world, some of which may even be true, and it revolves around the ultimate impossibility of knowing a man’s heart. More than any other book I’ve read, it truly deserves the title of voyage extraordinaire.

_{Alphonse de Neuville, Captain Nemo and Professor Arronax}