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mmcirvinProf. Pierre Aronnax, naturalist of the Paris Museum, arrives in New York City from the wilds of Nebraska to find the world abuzz with news of an unidentified object menacing shipping on the high seas. Aronnax is in high demand for interviews, since he's the author of a popular book on the mysteries of the ocean. His best guess, based on fragmentary descriptions and the process of elimination, is that the thing is a monstrous narwhal.
Invited to join an expedition to find and extirpate the beast, Aronnax takes his imperturbable, Jeeves-like valet Conseil and jumps at the chance. Swept overboard in a confrontation with the mysterious object, he finds himself marooned on its very surface with Conseil and irascible Québécois harpooner Ned Land. It is no narwhal, but a submarine of extraordinary size and power. Taken prisoner by the vessel's uncommunicative crew, they soon find themselves face to face with its enigmatic designer and captain, a mercurial genius who goes only by Nemo.
SPOILERS ahoy...
There's a reason 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Verne's best-known and most-adapted novel. This is clearly the best and most complex of the Verne novels I've read, though it has a history of being somewhat damaged in translation and treated as a children's book in the English-speaking world; I must have read it dozens of times as a kid, in a "Children's Classics" edition that was probably heavily abridged.
I read and enjoyed a better English translation with extensive notes some years ago, which I think was William Butcher's; reading it in the original French also reveals it to be a surprisingly complex and nuanced story. To the usual Verne travelogue with unusual technology (extrapolated in what Verne intends to be a hard-science-fiction style), he adds his greatest character study, more involved drama and emotion than he usually puts into one of these adventure tales, and some interestingly ambivalent politics, revolving around the question of violent radicalism.
The Captain
The question of what, precisely, Captain Nemo's deal might be is the animating mystery of the novel. It's established early on that he's decided to divorce himself entirely from the mass of human society, and the land--the Nautilus was built piece by piece through anonymous, secretive deals with human industry, but everything Nemo uses to sustain it and its crew, he now gets from the sea, with his only other base being a hollow, extinct volcanic island with a secret underwater passage to its interior.
Captain Nemo has what seem to be a combination of anti-imperialist and libertarian ideas. He rails against despots and colonial oppressors, takes the side of the oppressed of the earth against them, proposes at one point establishing a sort of undersea colony free of land-based tyranny. The sea, to Nemo, is a place of unlimited freedom, the only place where he can be fully himself. It's somewhat in conflict with the state of genteel imprisonment in which he keeps his guests--a point that Aronnax tries, unsuccessfully, to use against him late in the story.
There's also the question of Nemo's men. It's implied that they are all seekers of refuge from tyranny who have similarly abjured all contact with land. Nemo probably has more of them than he needs to run the ship. But in the text, they're treated more as faceless minions, like the minor henchmen of a Bond villain. Captain Nemo, I think, is pretty clearly an antecedent for at least the cinematic version of the Bond villain: a man with a strangely huge and powerful secret organization, super-technology, a hollowed-out volcano base and a large supply of minions, driven to the point of insanity by some obscure revenge. But Verne likes him more than most Bond movies like their bad guys. He identifies with revolutionary and liberating figures such as (among others) Washington, Lincoln and John Brown. He venerates the wreck of the French republican ship Vengeur, sunk in a battle with the British during the French revolutionary wars.
Near the book's conclusion, though, Nemo's motivation becomes clearer: it's personal. He's driven by revenge against some Earthly power that evidently destroyed his life and killed his family. The identity of this state remains unknown; the warship that he destroys at the climax is flying a pennant whose colors are unclear to Aronnax, Conseil and Land.
Verne spares nothing in describing the brutality of this attack, the drowning men swarming like ants over the hull of the wrecked ship as trapped air explodes from beneath its decks: he makes it clear that Captain Nemo is an unapologetic mass murderer. But there's still a lot of sympathy there.
The anonymity of Nemo's enemy is due to meddling by Verne's publisher. Originally, Nemo was supposed to be a Pole, and the ship was Russian, but there was worry about the commercial implications of offending the Russians. In the story's open ending, much about Nemo remains unrevealed.
In the sequel, The Mysterious Island, which I have not read, Verne apparently does give Nemo a different backstory: he's an Indian named Prince Dakkar who participated in the Rebellion of 1857, and his quarrel is with the British Empire (which makes some sense given the location of 20,000 Leagues' final battle, near the English Channel). I think Nemo as Indian works--it jibes with his touching encounter with a pearl diver near Sri Lanka earlier in the book. Nemo as a prince, I'm not so sure. The Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues seems to have anti-monarchical, republican sentiments. But it would explain where all of his start-up resources came from. Maybe experience changed him. There are apparently other continuity issues with that book. In any event, that detail has inspired some contemporary depictions.
Another connection occurred to me, though: Nemo's prominent use of an N monogram as his standard would, I think, have obvious associations for a 19th-century Frenchman. Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues not during a republican period, but during the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Whether he was trying to flatter the Emperor's famous uncle by association or critique him, I'm not sure. Maybe both.
The Guests
As in many of these stories, we have a set of contrasting companions as protagonists. Unusually, it's a first-person narrative. Prof. Aronnax, the narrator, is the consummate scientist who's actually happy to be a prisoner of Nemo as long as he can observe an unlimited pageant of wonders of the sea... and can get away in some vague futurity so he can publish. His passion for cataloguing sea life means that Verne can use him as the vehicle for Verne's trademark long infodumps, in this case about species of things he saw swim past the window.
It's also possible to see a kind of slowly gathering bromance between Aronnax and Nemo--he clearly admires the captain as a scientist, as an inventor/engineer and as a political idealist, as much as he is alarmed by Nemo's brooding, sulking periods, and the question of what precisely Nemo is doing during the periods when he locks them up and demands they not investigate. When he finds out, it clearly rocks Aronnax to the core. But until then, Nemo also seems to enjoy Aronnax's company as an educated audience for his collected scientific wonders. Most of the expeditions outside in diving suits involve all of the guests and several of Nemo's crew, but when he goes out to reveal the secret wonders of Atlantis, he's alone with Aronnax.
Conseil isn't an audience-identification character like Passepartout in Around the World in Eighty Days; instead he's more of an odd comic-relief character, an unflappably loyal servant who Aronnax has trained into a hobby of reciting the Linnean classification of any living thing he sees. I called him Jeeves-like and at times he displays a similarly startling level of intelligence, as when he proposes estimating the Nautilus's crew size by calculating from their rate of oxygen consumption.
The role of audience identification passes more to Ned Land, the brusque man of action who finds Nemo highly suspect and doesn't like being cooped up on a submarine at all. Ned is the one who's constantly pointing out the injustice of the situation and formulating plans to escape, which Aronnax joins only reluctantly, but which are thwarted by circumstance until the very end of the book. The Disney movie, of course, cast him as Kirk Douglas and gave him more of a protagonist role, which makes some sense.
The Nautilus
Aside from Nemo, the other central focus of the book is his vessel, the Nautilus. It's been somewhat altered in the popular imagination by the 1950s Disney live-action movie, which depicted it as having ornate "Victorian" exterior styling and implied, somewhat cleverly, that Captain Nemo had prematurely discovered a form of nuclear power. None of this is from the text. In the book, the ship is a battery-powered electric vehicle with a more utilitarian external shape, a simple spindle with a protruding pilothouse and lantern, inclined planes for vertical maneuvering at its sides, screws and rudder in the rear, and a sharp ram at the prow which is its primary weapon. There are railings around the top to define a low external deck, riding just above the waves when the Nautilus is at the surface.
In this, Verne was influenced by an early French submarine of his time called the Plongeur; the Nautilus is more or less an enlarged Plongeur in shape. This is likely even the source for the Nautilus's unusual accessory boat, a covered vessel concealed in an airtight cavity that can pop up to the surface from underwater.
Inside, the Nautilus is opulent: there is a luxurious salon-museum and library, the famous pipe organ, comfortable quarters (though Nemo's room is more ascetically furnished). The number of Captain Nemo's crew is never made clear--we never see very much of them, aside from his first officer, who speaks only in the unintelligible conlang that Nemo seems to use as a lingua franca for his crew--and the protagonists' uncertainty about whether he has ten men or several hundred is a brake on Ned Land's proposal to take the boat by force.
The capabilities of the Nautilus's batteries go far beyond plausibility to the regime we'd expect of a nuclear power plant. Verne finesses this by explaining that they're not the batteries you might know, but a super-advanced cell of Nemo's design based on sodium (sodium-ion cells actually are a focus of modern research!) They are not rechargeable, in the usual sense--it seems to be an open cycle based on replenishing the cells with sodium extracted from undersea coal at Nemo's secret volcano base. Very much not a carbon-neutral process.
In a nifty segment toward the end, Verne makes the surprise revelation that the Nautilus can retract its protruding external elements to prepare to ram a ship, a kind of anime-esque battle-mode transformation. That really tickled me when I read the Butcher translation, for some reason.
The Sea
And, of course, there's Verne's depiction of the sea itself. As in Round the Moon, he's showing his research on the page as often as he can, having Prof. Aronnax sometimes spout page-long lists of species of fish. It's an interestingly outdated depiction in some ways: there is no inkling of plate tectonics or sea-floor spreading, of course, and I can only imagine the delight with which Jules Verne would have described the subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, had he known about them. Instead, he takes the Atlantis myth literally and describes the Atlantic Ocean as the remnant of a vast continent sinking into the earth.
In one episode, Nemo takes the Nautilus under the Antarctic ice pack and becomes the first person to reach the South Pole, which is depicted as existing on a conveniently ice-free shoreline rather than the miles-thick continental ice plateau where we now know it to be. It wasn't too bad a guess.
The attitude taken toward human relations with the sea as a whole is interesting, too. Reading this now, it occurs to me that a modern Nemo would probably be written primarily as an ecological avenger, protecting the fragile seas from human depredation. There are a few places where that kind of sensibility emerges--Nemo disapproves of the wasteful overhunting of right whales, and forbids Ned from doing any whale hunting that isn't necessary to feed his crew.
But for the most part, especially earlier in the novel, the sea is depicted mostly as a place of endless bounty and freedom. The Nautilus keeps its crew well-fed on the inexhaustible take from its fishing nets, and rare delicacies and even crew uniforms are fashioned from sea life. Nemo seems constantly bowled over by the riches the seas give him for the taking. His indignation is mostly reserved for oppressors of human beings. He's not quite a Captain Planet figure, not yet.
And there's a weirdly moralized angle to the book's take on the sea in one or two places as well. After Nemo forbids Ned Land from hunting right whales, he then immediately goes right ahead and uses the Nautilus's ram to exterminate a bunch of sperm whales that are, he says, coming to kill the right whales. The sperm whales are described even by Aronnax in terms of horror that paint them as misshapen creatures of pure evil, errors of creation that would be best extirpated entirely. It comes across as very strange to a modern sensibility. But it also effectively foreshadows Nemo's behavior as a bloody avenger at the climax of the novel, and I think that is a secondary purpose of the passage.
All in all, though this drags a bit in its long middle and its conclusion is a bit hurried, this is a fantastic read, justly regarded as Jules Verne's masterpiece. I always enjoy coming back to it.
Invited to join an expedition to find and extirpate the beast, Aronnax takes his imperturbable, Jeeves-like valet Conseil and jumps at the chance. Swept overboard in a confrontation with the mysterious object, he finds himself marooned on its very surface with Conseil and irascible Québécois harpooner Ned Land. It is no narwhal, but a submarine of extraordinary size and power. Taken prisoner by the vessel's uncommunicative crew, they soon find themselves face to face with its enigmatic designer and captain, a mercurial genius who goes only by Nemo.
SPOILERS ahoy...
There's a reason 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Verne's best-known and most-adapted novel. This is clearly the best and most complex of the Verne novels I've read, though it has a history of being somewhat damaged in translation and treated as a children's book in the English-speaking world; I must have read it dozens of times as a kid, in a "Children's Classics" edition that was probably heavily abridged.
I read and enjoyed a better English translation with extensive notes some years ago, which I think was William Butcher's; reading it in the original French also reveals it to be a surprisingly complex and nuanced story. To the usual Verne travelogue with unusual technology (extrapolated in what Verne intends to be a hard-science-fiction style), he adds his greatest character study, more involved drama and emotion than he usually puts into one of these adventure tales, and some interestingly ambivalent politics, revolving around the question of violent radicalism.
The Captain
The question of what, precisely, Captain Nemo's deal might be is the animating mystery of the novel. It's established early on that he's decided to divorce himself entirely from the mass of human society, and the land--the Nautilus was built piece by piece through anonymous, secretive deals with human industry, but everything Nemo uses to sustain it and its crew, he now gets from the sea, with his only other base being a hollow, extinct volcanic island with a secret underwater passage to its interior.
Captain Nemo has what seem to be a combination of anti-imperialist and libertarian ideas. He rails against despots and colonial oppressors, takes the side of the oppressed of the earth against them, proposes at one point establishing a sort of undersea colony free of land-based tyranny. The sea, to Nemo, is a place of unlimited freedom, the only place where he can be fully himself. It's somewhat in conflict with the state of genteel imprisonment in which he keeps his guests--a point that Aronnax tries, unsuccessfully, to use against him late in the story.
There's also the question of Nemo's men. It's implied that they are all seekers of refuge from tyranny who have similarly abjured all contact with land. Nemo probably has more of them than he needs to run the ship. But in the text, they're treated more as faceless minions, like the minor henchmen of a Bond villain. Captain Nemo, I think, is pretty clearly an antecedent for at least the cinematic version of the Bond villain: a man with a strangely huge and powerful secret organization, super-technology, a hollowed-out volcano base and a large supply of minions, driven to the point of insanity by some obscure revenge. But Verne likes him more than most Bond movies like their bad guys. He identifies with revolutionary and liberating figures such as (among others) Washington, Lincoln and John Brown. He venerates the wreck of the French republican ship Vengeur, sunk in a battle with the British during the French revolutionary wars.
Near the book's conclusion, though, Nemo's motivation becomes clearer: it's personal. He's driven by revenge against some Earthly power that evidently destroyed his life and killed his family. The identity of this state remains unknown; the warship that he destroys at the climax is flying a pennant whose colors are unclear to Aronnax, Conseil and Land.
Verne spares nothing in describing the brutality of this attack, the drowning men swarming like ants over the hull of the wrecked ship as trapped air explodes from beneath its decks: he makes it clear that Captain Nemo is an unapologetic mass murderer. But there's still a lot of sympathy there.
The anonymity of Nemo's enemy is due to meddling by Verne's publisher. Originally, Nemo was supposed to be a Pole, and the ship was Russian, but there was worry about the commercial implications of offending the Russians. In the story's open ending, much about Nemo remains unrevealed.
In the sequel, The Mysterious Island, which I have not read, Verne apparently does give Nemo a different backstory: he's an Indian named Prince Dakkar who participated in the Rebellion of 1857, and his quarrel is with the British Empire (which makes some sense given the location of 20,000 Leagues' final battle, near the English Channel). I think Nemo as Indian works--it jibes with his touching encounter with a pearl diver near Sri Lanka earlier in the book. Nemo as a prince, I'm not so sure. The Captain Nemo of 20,000 Leagues seems to have anti-monarchical, republican sentiments. But it would explain where all of his start-up resources came from. Maybe experience changed him. There are apparently other continuity issues with that book. In any event, that detail has inspired some contemporary depictions.
Another connection occurred to me, though: Nemo's prominent use of an N monogram as his standard would, I think, have obvious associations for a 19th-century Frenchman. Verne wrote 20,000 Leagues not during a republican period, but during the Second Empire of Napoleon III. Whether he was trying to flatter the Emperor's famous uncle by association or critique him, I'm not sure. Maybe both.
The Guests
As in many of these stories, we have a set of contrasting companions as protagonists. Unusually, it's a first-person narrative. Prof. Aronnax, the narrator, is the consummate scientist who's actually happy to be a prisoner of Nemo as long as he can observe an unlimited pageant of wonders of the sea... and can get away in some vague futurity so he can publish. His passion for cataloguing sea life means that Verne can use him as the vehicle for Verne's trademark long infodumps, in this case about species of things he saw swim past the window.
It's also possible to see a kind of slowly gathering bromance between Aronnax and Nemo--he clearly admires the captain as a scientist, as an inventor/engineer and as a political idealist, as much as he is alarmed by Nemo's brooding, sulking periods, and the question of what precisely Nemo is doing during the periods when he locks them up and demands they not investigate. When he finds out, it clearly rocks Aronnax to the core. But until then, Nemo also seems to enjoy Aronnax's company as an educated audience for his collected scientific wonders. Most of the expeditions outside in diving suits involve all of the guests and several of Nemo's crew, but when he goes out to reveal the secret wonders of Atlantis, he's alone with Aronnax.
Conseil isn't an audience-identification character like Passepartout in Around the World in Eighty Days; instead he's more of an odd comic-relief character, an unflappably loyal servant who Aronnax has trained into a hobby of reciting the Linnean classification of any living thing he sees. I called him Jeeves-like and at times he displays a similarly startling level of intelligence, as when he proposes estimating the Nautilus's crew size by calculating from their rate of oxygen consumption.
The role of audience identification passes more to Ned Land, the brusque man of action who finds Nemo highly suspect and doesn't like being cooped up on a submarine at all. Ned is the one who's constantly pointing out the injustice of the situation and formulating plans to escape, which Aronnax joins only reluctantly, but which are thwarted by circumstance until the very end of the book. The Disney movie, of course, cast him as Kirk Douglas and gave him more of a protagonist role, which makes some sense.
The Nautilus
Aside from Nemo, the other central focus of the book is his vessel, the Nautilus. It's been somewhat altered in the popular imagination by the 1950s Disney live-action movie, which depicted it as having ornate "Victorian" exterior styling and implied, somewhat cleverly, that Captain Nemo had prematurely discovered a form of nuclear power. None of this is from the text. In the book, the ship is a battery-powered electric vehicle with a more utilitarian external shape, a simple spindle with a protruding pilothouse and lantern, inclined planes for vertical maneuvering at its sides, screws and rudder in the rear, and a sharp ram at the prow which is its primary weapon. There are railings around the top to define a low external deck, riding just above the waves when the Nautilus is at the surface.
In this, Verne was influenced by an early French submarine of his time called the Plongeur; the Nautilus is more or less an enlarged Plongeur in shape. This is likely even the source for the Nautilus's unusual accessory boat, a covered vessel concealed in an airtight cavity that can pop up to the surface from underwater.
Inside, the Nautilus is opulent: there is a luxurious salon-museum and library, the famous pipe organ, comfortable quarters (though Nemo's room is more ascetically furnished). The number of Captain Nemo's crew is never made clear--we never see very much of them, aside from his first officer, who speaks only in the unintelligible conlang that Nemo seems to use as a lingua franca for his crew--and the protagonists' uncertainty about whether he has ten men or several hundred is a brake on Ned Land's proposal to take the boat by force.
The capabilities of the Nautilus's batteries go far beyond plausibility to the regime we'd expect of a nuclear power plant. Verne finesses this by explaining that they're not the batteries you might know, but a super-advanced cell of Nemo's design based on sodium (sodium-ion cells actually are a focus of modern research!) They are not rechargeable, in the usual sense--it seems to be an open cycle based on replenishing the cells with sodium extracted from undersea coal at Nemo's secret volcano base. Very much not a carbon-neutral process.
In a nifty segment toward the end, Verne makes the surprise revelation that the Nautilus can retract its protruding external elements to prepare to ram a ship, a kind of anime-esque battle-mode transformation. That really tickled me when I read the Butcher translation, for some reason.
The Sea
And, of course, there's Verne's depiction of the sea itself. As in Round the Moon, he's showing his research on the page as often as he can, having Prof. Aronnax sometimes spout page-long lists of species of fish. It's an interestingly outdated depiction in some ways: there is no inkling of plate tectonics or sea-floor spreading, of course, and I can only imagine the delight with which Jules Verne would have described the subduction zones and mid-ocean ridges, had he known about them. Instead, he takes the Atlantis myth literally and describes the Atlantic Ocean as the remnant of a vast continent sinking into the earth.
In one episode, Nemo takes the Nautilus under the Antarctic ice pack and becomes the first person to reach the South Pole, which is depicted as existing on a conveniently ice-free shoreline rather than the miles-thick continental ice plateau where we now know it to be. It wasn't too bad a guess.
The attitude taken toward human relations with the sea as a whole is interesting, too. Reading this now, it occurs to me that a modern Nemo would probably be written primarily as an ecological avenger, protecting the fragile seas from human depredation. There are a few places where that kind of sensibility emerges--Nemo disapproves of the wasteful overhunting of right whales, and forbids Ned from doing any whale hunting that isn't necessary to feed his crew.
But for the most part, especially earlier in the novel, the sea is depicted mostly as a place of endless bounty and freedom. The Nautilus keeps its crew well-fed on the inexhaustible take from its fishing nets, and rare delicacies and even crew uniforms are fashioned from sea life. Nemo seems constantly bowled over by the riches the seas give him for the taking. His indignation is mostly reserved for oppressors of human beings. He's not quite a Captain Planet figure, not yet.
And there's a weirdly moralized angle to the book's take on the sea in one or two places as well. After Nemo forbids Ned Land from hunting right whales, he then immediately goes right ahead and uses the Nautilus's ram to exterminate a bunch of sperm whales that are, he says, coming to kill the right whales. The sperm whales are described even by Aronnax in terms of horror that paint them as misshapen creatures of pure evil, errors of creation that would be best extirpated entirely. It comes across as very strange to a modern sensibility. But it also effectively foreshadows Nemo's behavior as a bloody avenger at the climax of the novel, and I think that is a secondary purpose of the passage.
All in all, though this drags a bit in its long middle and its conclusion is a bit hurried, this is a fantastic read, justly regarded as Jules Verne's masterpiece. I always enjoy coming back to it.