20,000 Leagues Under The Sea

After Agatha Christie, Jules Verne is the most translated author in publishing history. He wrote dozens of books that can be classified as a science fiction, with many titles almost household names, but I had yet to read one until I just finished 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

No doubt most who think of this book think of the movie from 1954, specifically the scene in which the submarine is attacked by a giant squid. That is almost at the end of the book, though, and there are many other adventures, but I found something missing in the story.

It all begins when a mysterious creature is scuttling ships along the trade routes. A naturalist, M. Arronax, is brought aboard the American ship Abraham Lincoln to try to hunt it down. Aronnax thinks its a gigantic narwhal, but when he comes face to face with it he sees something quite different: "There was no doubt about it! This monster, this natural phenomenon that had puzzled the learned world, and over thrown and misled the imagination of seamen of both hemispheres, it must be owned was a still more astonishing phenomenon, inasmuch as it was a simply human construction."

The submarine, as it is now seen, sinks the Abraham Lincoln, and Aronnax and his valet, Conseil, end up in the ocean, along with a Canadian harpooner, Ned Land. They are taken aboard the ship. They meet the Captain, who calls himself Nemo (Latin for "no man") and are also told they are prisoners, as Nemo will not have anyone leaving the ship to tell the world about him. Nemo is one of the most mysterious characters in fiction, as we never learn his real name or just what he is up to, although he states plainly that he has turned his back on the terrestrial world and will spend his life under the sea.

Aronnax is dazzled by all the ship, called the Nautilus, has to offer. Some think that Verne predicted the submarine, but there were such ships before (they fought in the U.S. Civil War) but he improved upon it, and indeed, even the nuclear submarines of today don't have large libraries. Land, on the other hand, is itching to leave, except when he gets a chance to kill animals.

The adventure takes them around the world, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, where Nemo takes them on a walk on the bottom of the sea, through a tunnel where the Suez Canal is today, and then to Antarctica, where they almost get destroyed by ice. The squid scene, in which it is actually several cephalopods, is told in grand high adventure style. But the end of the book, in which Nemo kind of loses his mind, is quite thrilling, making up for some rather dull passages.

As with a lot of science fiction, Verne uses a lot of names and numbers. Aronnax describes a lot of sea life, giving us their Latin name, too, plus some terms that have fallen out of use, such as the word "poulp" for the squid. There are also many references to latitude and longitude, as if we were following along on a map, exact dates (we are in the 1860s) and measurements. God are there measurements. Here's a sample: "The portion of the terrestrial globe which is covered by water is estimated at upwards of eighty millions of acres. This fluid mass comprises two billions two hundred and fifty millions of cubic miles, forming a spherical body of a diameter of sixty leagues, the weight of which would be three quintillions of tons."

I became fascinated by how the prisoners must have spent their days. Aronnax, of course, observed flora and fauna, but I wondered what Ned Land did all day. The story might be quite different if he narrated it.

Captain Nemo has become one of the central figures in 19th century science fiction, even giving his name to a lost fish in a Pixar film, and at times seems like a Bond villain, but Verne leaves him open to interpretation. Toward the end of the book we glimpse what might be a wife and child, presumably deceased. Nemo also takes the Nautilus to a wreck of a ship called the Avenger, which might be a clue to Nemo's identity. But at the end, Nemo and his ship slip back into the briny deep. Aronnax says, "Perhaps I was never to know who he was, from whence he came, or where he was going to, but I saw the man move, and apart from the savant. It was no common misanthropy which had shut Captain Nemo and his companions within the Nautilus, but a hatred, either monstrous or sublime, which time could never weaken."