Book Report: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea by Jules Verne (1869, 1961)

Wow, has it been five years already since I read The Best of Jules Verne (Around the World in 80 Days, Robur the Conqueror aka The Clipper in the Clouds, and Journey to the Center of the Earth). I guess it has been that long. Man, time passes.

At any rate, the book starts out a little like The Clipper in the Clouds, wherein the news contains stories of various sightings of a great crusteacan in the sea causing damage among other ships. WHen an American schooner goes a-hunting for it, the crew brings along a French undersea biology naturalist, his servant, and a Canadian harpooner join them. When they find the beast, they–the trio last mentioned–go to attack it, only to find themselves cut off from the schooner–and they discover that the beast is actually a submarine piloted by Captain Nemo, a man who has quit the world above the sea along with his crew of similarly minded men. The trio are taken prisoner, basically, and travel 20,000 leagues around the oceans–to be honest, I thought up until reading this book that they went 20,000 leagues deep–but they went 20,000 leagues east to west and north to south, mostly not that deep.

They have a series of adventures, which are mostly visits to exotic and often underseas locations. They visit Atlantis, are attacked by giant squid, visit the wrecks from various sea calamaties, and make their way to the South Pole. After the attack of the giant squid, though, Nemo goes a little mad and the submarine wanders until it is caught in a whirlpool off of Norway just as the dry landers escape–which is convenient and a bit abrupt as Verne was meeting his word count or number of episodes to serialize account.

It’s an okay book. It understood submarine travel, although the dimensions of the Nautilus do not represent the dimensions of any actual submarine–too spacious. And the book relies an awful lot on the main character going into catalogues of undersea life that add nothing but word count to the story–this book appeared after Moby Dick, so I wondered if it had some sort of deeper meaning to the verbosity like Melville tried with his work, but I suspect Verne was only trying to make word count.

This book is the last of these Doubleday editions that I’ve read this year–Hans Brinker, or the Silver Skates, Alice in Wonderland, Black Beauty, and Heidi being the other four). I bought these at some point, perhaps thinking I would read them to my children, but I did not. Ah, well, at least I have read them before my children have left me. Which is some small consolation.