Welcome back to Book Club!
As a writer of steampunk myself, I am embarrassed to admit that this is my first time reading anything by Jules Verne. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a book that has been on my mind since high school, but just due to its writing style and my maturity at the time, it was not something I was able to properly get into. However, I'm coming up on having been out of school for a year longer than I was in it, and a lot has changed. What better time to give this novel another go?
But before we start this review, let me say a few things; I'm currently writing what I hope to be my first freely available serial web-novel. It's a fantasy adventure I call Where Sky Meets Sea, and while the first chapter isn't out yet (as of the time of me writing this), it WILL be available on Royal Road, where I have also published a short story collection called The Many Horrors of Windle Rock, (which you can read right this moment, if you so wish).
But I bring this up because; in preparation for crafting an adventure story about sailing the seas, I've started reading a lot about ships, piracy, the 1700's, and have also picked a few classic novels to read as inspiration. One of them was Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the other was this very book we're talking about today, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, by Jules Verne. While not a pirate novel, it is about traversing the ocean, and the scope of my story has more to do with seafaring than just piracy, so I figured any and all content is worth my time.
Treasure Island is a great deal shorter than Leagues, and it also has left a much, MUCH more tangible mark on modern storytelling and culture. The archetypal pirate we all know today -- that of a swashbuckling, peg-legged, hook-handed scallywag -- was borne, in essence, from Stevenson's romantic portrayal of the practice. But I regret to say that I honestly did not like that book. I found it to be an absolute slog, detrimentally expository, and often lacking anything that would keep me interested. I didn't give a damn about the story, or the characters, and reading it was just a pain. I want to blame its age, but as you'll soon discover, I think that's not fair at all.
Somehow, though, everyone on Goodreads seemed to love it! Loads of 4 and 5 star reviews. I can't say I'm too shocked by that, it is the classic pirate adventure... but I just don't feel the same way.
What really ticks me off, though, is that when I finished 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (spoiler alert, I loved it), the top review was one of those god-awful, ramble-y, meme-and-GIF infested hodgepodge piles of shit that passes for literary critique on that god-forsaken website. But the worst part was that the writer had the gall to give this book a 1/10. I know I shouldn't care, but I just wanted to rant about how god awful Goodreads is, so let this one slide please, thanks:
Goodreads seems to encourage a serious lack of critical thought about any given book. Readers on that website treat reads like daytime television, and their reviews are horrible, unfunny, and often written in terrible faith. Nothing is explained in adequate detail; it's never, "it's bad because of: " or "it's good because of:" -- it's just bad, or good. But when we're given an explanation why, it's just "blah, boring, blah, problematic, blah, main character was so handsome, etc," with no real justification. Clique-y reviews that the userbase think have spicy "hot takes," or are full of ridiculous nonsense like ten or fifteen GIF's of some Mean Girls or Game of Thrones character rolling their eyes, seem to be all they want to see, and when a genuinely fascinating book like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is just a little more complex than, idk, say, Twilight, reading it makes their heads burst into fucking flames.
- Rant over. I know that was pretentious, I'm sorry -
So let me balance the act, and tell you why I think this novel was a masterpiece.
When I started reading this book, I was very aware of how easy it was to understand. It was originally written in French, and I am not ignorant to the fact that any translated story is going to lose some (or a lot) of its original nuance and intention. I can't just learn a new language for every book I want to read though, even though I would if I could, so unfortunately this is a barrier that can only be recognized, and then has to be disregarded. I'm very much a fan of preserving the intentions of what the author says their work is meant to express or be about, and I do not like alternate interpretations, so while there is a swath of foreign content I love (mainly manga) I do have to careful about things that could be misunderstood.
That being said, going from French to English is, I'm sure, much less of an issue than going from Japanese to English, so for the sake of not making this harder than it has to be, I'm gonna treat this book as if it was written this way.
Our story opens with Pierre Aronnax, a marine biologist working on the discovery of a "large cetacean," with a luminescent quality supposedly a large horn -- like a narwhal -- that has been spotted ramming into ships. So he enlists on an expedition to find it, and... well... things change quite quickly.
If you know nothing about 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, then I honestly don't want to spoil it here, because even in the first few chapters there is a narrative curveball (with simple, yet brilliant setup) that changes the scope and direction going forward. I don't want to rob you of experiencing that. When it happens, though, the true adventure begins, and Verne takes us on a journey through the world's various oceans, islands, seas, and many such related sights.
With each chapter, I was pulled into a world of science, and whimsy -- showing me concepts and imagery that are so ahead of its time it's almost scary, while all the while so deeply compelling. Characters walk upon the floor of the ocean in this novel several times, and each time they do I am blown away by such an old book's ability to illustrate wondrous nautical landscapes. When there is adventure, there is peril. When there is exploration, there is education. There are dozens of aquatic species named in this novel, all by their scientific names (which I think is all part of the protagonist's characterization, as well as Verne flaunting what I can only assume is his mountain of research). While there could've been a better job done at describing some of them, I can't help but appreciate the effort it would take to learn about all these animals to put them in the story as properly as they are. But it's not just about the animals, either. Verne has done research, too, on geography and naval history to such an impressive degree that this alone is enough to make the book worth reading. The fact that we got four very diverse and compelling characters in a marvelous story alongside it, is not something to sneeze at.
I was enthralled by the mysterious motivations of Captain Nemo, and his incredible submarine. I very much appreciated the banter between Ned Land and Pierre Aronnax, as well as his assistant, Conseil. I got a lot out of this story; themes such as the constant struggle of man over nature, and how -- while the feud between men can be left on land, the fury of the natural world can never be escaped -- were in every corner of the book, and thus made for a very rewarding read.
There's also an event around the halfway point of the book that seems mysterious at first, but later we learn what it may have been only by seeing something else, and the revelation is just... I don't even know what to say, I just aspire to write that way. It happens, we don't really know what it was, but then we have context for it right at the end, and suddenly the character of Captain Nemo starts making sense. Bu the revelation is dark, and thrilling. That's all I'll say.
I also quite liked the ending of this book, but I can't say why without spoiling the tone, and if I spoil the tone, you might be able to tell what happens. So I'll leave it at that, and one day if I do talk about what happens in this... uh, more than 100-year-old book, I'll be sure to remember the end as a talking point. All I can sat to you now is, please, do yourself a favor and read this book. You will learn not only a lot about the ocean, its various species, and some fun history -- you will also learn how compelling an adventure story (and its characters) can actually be.
That's all for now. Thank you for reading.
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