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mmcirvinPhileas Fogg, a London gentleman of independent means and eccentrically fixed ways, seems to do absolutely nothing with his days but read newspapers and play whist at his private club. Immediately after taking on a new manservant, a Frenchman named Passepartout (who has sought employment with Fogg because he's decided he's had enough excitement in his life already), Fogg gets into a conversation about a fleeing bank robber in the news and makes an audacious bet, that (as proposed in a newspaper article he read) he can circumnavigate the Earth in just eighty days. He goes home early, takes Passepartout with him, and leaves immediately on the next train out. Around the world they go, having various misadventures, pursued by an English police inspector who believes Fogg, himself, to be that selfsame bank robber--it would certainly explain his otherwise incomprehensible behavior...
I actually never read Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days as a kid, though I knew the broad outlines of the story from a high-school stage production that some of my friends were in, and it was in a genre of story that I loved as a kid, so I probably would have enjoyed it. I just read it for the first time, again in the original. In the following, there are many SPOILERS, so beware...
This is unusual among Verne's "extraordinary voyages" in that there's nothing science-fictional or otherwise fantastic about it, though it's certainly got some exoticism of the sort that a modern critic would call Orientalist or colonialist in nature. Less than you might expect, though, since it's largely concerned with the mechanics of travel, and much of it takes place in the strange, disconnected cocoon-world of international travelers that a modern traveler will recognize as still existing today, albeit with all the details different. Verne was writing a story of the Amazing World of Today, which in the late 19th century had shrunken like never before, and he uses local color mostly as a means of throwing up obstacles.
When he does that, those are the most questionable parts of the story from the perspective of someone concerned about, shall we say, outdated cultural depictions. Yeah, there is some of that here. The story's understated romantic subplot starts in northern India when Fogg and Passepartout rescue a local noblewoman, Aouda, from being burned to death in a sati ceremony, a custom that was never actually that common (and Verne seems to know this) but is certainly sensational. Inspector Fix at one point trips up Passepartout by getting him high in a Hong Kong opium den, a vice that Verne is careful to blame on the English. Later on, the description of a battle with a band of marauding Lakota near Fort Kearny, Nebraska is handled more or less like a Western dime novel--they probably get dehumanized more than anyone else in the story. But Verne is more interested in how wacky Englishmen and Americans are, in characteristic and sometimes violent ways. Fix, the police inspector, starts out as an adversary who schemes to create obstacles to slow Fogg down until he can obtain an arrest warrant, then turns into a quasi-ally interested in speeding Fogg along so he can get him back under English jurisdiction to spring the trap.
Fogg himself is an interesting if opaque character, an "English eccentric" to the extent that I wonder if he is entirely neurotypical. His key characteristics are hardly ever betraying any sort of emotion, and being consumed by monomania for his around-the-world project. Passepartout, the audience-identification character here like most of Verne's Frenchmen, becomes interested in seeing the world as he is forced to collide with it, but Fogg isn't, at all. He's the kind of traveler who, upon arriving in a distant country, mostly stays at the Westernized hotel and avoids contact with the locals if he can help it. I think there's definitely some wry commentary hidden in there. Yet Fogg also has a sense of duty that can override the mission on occasion--and, through Aouda, this eventually causes some change of heart.
This is one of those books that, through screen adaptation, is associated with an iconic image that actually has no place in the story as written. Name Around the World in Eighty Days and the first thing people think of is probably Phileas Fogg and Passepartout riding in a balloon. But they never actually do that--it gets briefly mentioned and dismissed as an implausibly desperate way to try to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Fogg's enthusiasm for improvising odd means of transit, when the steamships or railroads fail him, by throwing money at people from his huge roll of banknotes is a major source of novelty in the story (it almost prefigures The Magic Christian at times), but there's no balloon.
The book has probably Verne's cleverest twist ending, in which, following the resolution of the conflict between Fix and Fogg, everyone arrives back in London apparently too late, only to realize that they've gained a day by circumnavigating the Earth to the east, and they did it in eighty days after all. I agree with the people who say this is completely implausible--even without a formalized International Date Line to cross, with all the consultation of steamship timetables that they do in America, there's no way Fogg would not have realized at some point before returning to London that his calendar was a day off. But it makes for great storytelling.
I actually never read Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days as a kid, though I knew the broad outlines of the story from a high-school stage production that some of my friends were in, and it was in a genre of story that I loved as a kid, so I probably would have enjoyed it. I just read it for the first time, again in the original. In the following, there are many SPOILERS, so beware...
This is unusual among Verne's "extraordinary voyages" in that there's nothing science-fictional or otherwise fantastic about it, though it's certainly got some exoticism of the sort that a modern critic would call Orientalist or colonialist in nature. Less than you might expect, though, since it's largely concerned with the mechanics of travel, and much of it takes place in the strange, disconnected cocoon-world of international travelers that a modern traveler will recognize as still existing today, albeit with all the details different. Verne was writing a story of the Amazing World of Today, which in the late 19th century had shrunken like never before, and he uses local color mostly as a means of throwing up obstacles.
When he does that, those are the most questionable parts of the story from the perspective of someone concerned about, shall we say, outdated cultural depictions. Yeah, there is some of that here. The story's understated romantic subplot starts in northern India when Fogg and Passepartout rescue a local noblewoman, Aouda, from being burned to death in a sati ceremony, a custom that was never actually that common (and Verne seems to know this) but is certainly sensational. Inspector Fix at one point trips up Passepartout by getting him high in a Hong Kong opium den, a vice that Verne is careful to blame on the English. Later on, the description of a battle with a band of marauding Lakota near Fort Kearny, Nebraska is handled more or less like a Western dime novel--they probably get dehumanized more than anyone else in the story. But Verne is more interested in how wacky Englishmen and Americans are, in characteristic and sometimes violent ways. Fix, the police inspector, starts out as an adversary who schemes to create obstacles to slow Fogg down until he can obtain an arrest warrant, then turns into a quasi-ally interested in speeding Fogg along so he can get him back under English jurisdiction to spring the trap.
Fogg himself is an interesting if opaque character, an "English eccentric" to the extent that I wonder if he is entirely neurotypical. His key characteristics are hardly ever betraying any sort of emotion, and being consumed by monomania for his around-the-world project. Passepartout, the audience-identification character here like most of Verne's Frenchmen, becomes interested in seeing the world as he is forced to collide with it, but Fogg isn't, at all. He's the kind of traveler who, upon arriving in a distant country, mostly stays at the Westernized hotel and avoids contact with the locals if he can help it. I think there's definitely some wry commentary hidden in there. Yet Fogg also has a sense of duty that can override the mission on occasion--and, through Aouda, this eventually causes some change of heart.
This is one of those books that, through screen adaptation, is associated with an iconic image that actually has no place in the story as written. Name Around the World in Eighty Days and the first thing people think of is probably Phileas Fogg and Passepartout riding in a balloon. But they never actually do that--it gets briefly mentioned and dismissed as an implausibly desperate way to try to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Fogg's enthusiasm for improvising odd means of transit, when the steamships or railroads fail him, by throwing money at people from his huge roll of banknotes is a major source of novelty in the story (it almost prefigures The Magic Christian at times), but there's no balloon.
The book has probably Verne's cleverest twist ending, in which, following the resolution of the conflict between Fix and Fogg, everyone arrives back in London apparently too late, only to realize that they've gained a day by circumnavigating the Earth to the east, and they did it in eighty days after all. I agree with the people who say this is completely implausible--even without a formalized International Date Line to cross, with all the consultation of steamship timetables that they do in America, there's no way Fogg would not have realized at some point before returning to London that his calendar was a day off. But it makes for great storytelling.