"Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea"

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Painting - Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Fine Art Print - Jonathan Barry

I wish I could say every classic is a classic. There are books out there that you honestly wonder if the editor was high on expired Nyquil or bribed with the inheritance of the Gate’s family in order to put the book into publication. My personal list of books that ought never to have made it out of Microsoft Word and into the 99 cent paperback bargain bin stretches as far as the moon and back. However, there are some books that make the world seem as though the clouds opened up and a ray of golden and God-like sun beams have personally kissed you on the face and tickled your imagination into new heights with their plot, characters and style. “Twenty Thousand Leagues und the Sea” by Jules Verne is the later of the two.

With its dynamic characters, revolutionary (for the time) ideas and tragic images, Verne offers us an enticing story. I’m sure I’m supposed to like it simply because it’s a classic and someone down the road had deemed it timeless and therefore we will follow along in Book-King’s shoes never questioning his opinion. But there are so many other reasons to enjoy this book that just simply stating “it’s a classic” doesn’t cover enough bases to make the outfield sweat.

The first good thing is our Narrator M. Pierre Aronnax who is an Ocean expert, Surgeon, and writer. At first he strikes you as too perfect, “What! Not only does he happen to be the leading expert on underwater life, but he’s a certified doctor AND goes on adventures? And let me guess, his excrement is fragranced with roses and exotic oils, too?” But luckily you have his physic which more than makes up for his talents. M. Aronnax is the narrator of the story, so naturally he won’t tell you he is frail and helpless. But from what one can glen from the description of perilous situations, he comes across as a very delicate man with a love for adventure, but may not necessarily have the ability to accomplish it. This is contradicted in the story a couple of times, but for the most part he has to be rescued by his companions. These two other main characters (Consiel, Aronnax’s servant, and Ned Land, a Canadian Whale hunter with a temper) who constantly save him from suffixation, drowning, and cannibals. These side-characters are pretty well defined, and each serves a good purpose to the story, like saving our narrator from death. They even remind us that land still exists, despite how wonderful the ocean may seem, and they are prisoners on the submarine. This turns up in the beginning when they set out on a quest aboard a ship call the Abraham Lincoln (ironically a ship with a male name which was still referred to as a ‘she’) to catch a troublesome Narwhal of alleged epic proportions. The concept of hunting an oceanic monster was pretty appealing and kept me interested long enough for our characters to get on board and start having all the fun under sea they could muster. They chase the ‘narwhal’ to the Pacific Ocean and come to combat with it, only for M. Aronnax, Consiel, and Ned Land to get thrown overboard. Convenient!

The scene where Consiel and Aronnax take turns swimming for one another while trying desperately to catch up with the ship is heartbreaking. It goes from them nearly drowning because of their clothes, taking turns swimming, to meeting up with Ned. Before too long, Aronnax’s legs cramp up and he can no longer swim and thus Consiel is forced to swim for the both of them. This scene was touching for me and I really felt the bond the two shared, and I will be honest with you fan girls, there are no women in this story but I never got the feeling that there was any homoeroticism in the book despite Aronnax’s effeminate physic.

So, as you can imagine, they are taken on board the Nautilus and are introduced to man-hating Captain Nemo. Nemo proves to be a very complex character in the beginning, as he locks the men in a chamber and doesn’t speak to them for a day before finally addressing them and confessing he understands their language and hadn’t decided if he was going to let them live or die yet. It turns out, Nemo, is a fan of M. Aronnax’s book on the ocean, and decides to let them live aboard the Nautilus in exchange for never leaving and promising that they will remain in their rooms if so ordered. As the book goes on, it almost seems as if Nemo is trying to be competitive with Aronnax, as if to say “You were close, but look how I was right.” He’s trying to convince the writer to fall in love with the sea as much as he does, and in that way he will gain their loyalty. Nemo can’t let them off the ship because they will reveal his submarine secret to the world, and for a while this tactic really works. Aronnax is in love with the ship, its revolutionary design, the ocean’s wonders, and all that the captain has to offer by completely cutting himself off from being on land.

The Nautilus itself is a masterpiece of engineering, not only for it’s time but for our time as well. It runs on electricity conducted from the ocean itself (hydro powered) when at the time very few places in the world had electricity, being limited to Cheyenne, Wyoming and Glenwood Springs, Colorado. The ship has defenses such as a “spur” which is the rough equivalent of an iron horn mounted to the front strong enough to pierce icebergs and steel. The ship is capable of diving down to the very depths of the ocean, and able to withstand the pressure of the ocean. It even has an electric current it can conduct to protect it from invaders and dangerous fish alike. Of course, despite the talents of the submarine, the ocean has it horrors.

Near the beginning of the novel, the Nautilus comes across a recent shipwreck. It is so recent in fact that the bodies have yet to decay. Verne describes bloated, frozen faces of terror in mid-scream. But the most powerful is that of a young woman holding her baby above her head “as a last-stitch effort” to save her child. That image literally haunted my nightmares. I loved it. The pacing in the scene is perfect. You get the right amount of imagery and you really feel sucked in- experiencing the pain of Aronnax as he observes the destruction. Verne truly displays an understanding of pacing in scenes that were meant to be tragic. He does this a few times in the book, allowing you to feel real sympathy for man. 

That being said, there are a few problems I have with the story, but most of them are probably just clerical errors that couldn’t be helped because of the time period it was written in and the translation from French to English. I was looking most forward to the battle with the Giant Squid, as it’s probably the most notorious scene from the novel. Well, much to my pleasant surprise, there wasn’t just one giant cuttlefish in this battle, there were multiple. The exact amount wasn’t stated, but it’s implied there are quite a few. I was excited at the prospect of an intense battle scene with the same great pacing I was previously exposed to in the novel. However, I think Jules Verne’s expertise is more to the suspense of tragedy than monster-fights. The battle with the cuttlefish is fast, almost too fast. He describes it as taking place over the course of half an hour and you really get the feeling that is almost too short of a time. You’re battling, what, six or more giant cuttlefish and that’s all you have to offer us? Thirty minutes of real danger because, according to the book, Cuttlefish are immune to the ship’s electroshock defenses? The narrator even admits his description of the battle with the giants was not exactly poetic, but it really felt rushed.

What was most scary about Nemo’s character is his extreme indifference to his own death. He obviously felt overwhelming remorse when one of his crew died, but in regards to the overall safety of his ship, he never even bats an eyebrow. You can never really tell if it’s because he doesn’t care if he lives or dies, or if he is genuinely THAT confident in the Nautilus. In some cases, it’s obvious he’s just confident in his design, such as the scene when cannibals tried to board the ship and were thrown back by the defenses. In other cases, like when the iceberg is closing around the submarine and Nemo very blatantly tells Aronnax that they stand a very good chance of being crushed to death or suffocating as though it were a polite conversation over tea.

We also have the problem of knowing what we know now. In Verne’s time, they didn’t know that Antarctica was a landmass, and there is a scene where they go under the ice to reach the South Pole. If you can buy into the world this book creates and accept their reality, it’s a good story and further proves just how arrogant Nemo can be. It almost feels like he read Aronnax’s book and in a fit of fat-headed triumph, decided to rub in his face just how wrong he could be about everything.

Don’t misunderstand, I did enjoy the character of Nemo, but he almost presented himself more as a villain of the book more than someone to be admired. He has a strange underwater cult that has abandoned humanity to live beneath the waves, and follows him blindly into dangerous situations without questioning him. They have even abandoned their native languages to speak their own. (This language is never taught to our main characters, much to my dismay.) This is borderline brainwashing. It’s not like the movies, where the crew is comprised of men from India evading the British; the crewmen are described as European ethnicities ranging from Ireland to Spain. Of course, Nemo has his reasons and is really presented as an anti-hero according to literature, but I feel he’s more of an anti-villain. He is a man who sought to do the wrong thing and regrets everything he does that involves taking human life. When ever someone dies, Nemo mourns them. He would have you think he is emotionless and cold, but he is really just as human as the rest of us. He even mourns the death of his enemies but somehow can’t forgive them for taking away everything he held dearly.

Another issues I took with the book, and that is perhaps because I never much cared for the subject in school, was the amount of Latitude and Longitude speak. Oh dear God was there enough jargon to turn me off in this book? Absolutely. Every chapter started with their latitude and longitude measurements, as if my first move would be to grab a geographical map of the world just to pinpoint the exact location of where the Nautilus was mid-journey. Verne, if you tell me you’re “somewhere in the Indian Ocean” I will take it and believe you.

Something that surprised me a lot was a very subtle message against Whaling. It surprised me because one of my favorite characters in the book is Ned Land who is “the prince of the harpoon.” He’s presented as grumpy and uneducated, but he was still likable and you could count on him in a bind. They discreetly talk about whaling through out the novel, but they even go into detail for some a brief period of time. Aronnax states that if whales are hunted continuously at the rate they currently were, then eventually they would be extinct and the oceans would become a breeding ground for illnesses because the Formica the whale consumed would have no natural predators. Interestingly enough the best case I’ve ever heard against whaling came from a science fiction novel.

Overall the book is wonderful, and my only regret is having heard so much about it before reading it. I’m not telling the end, because no doubt you’ve already seen it in a movie or read about it on Wikipedia, but you need to read it for yourselves. I defiantly think this book should be on the required reading list for High School kids. Why did I have to read “Animal Farm” when I could have been reading this gem? Where was this book when I was reading “The Giver” in sixth grade? Good God I will take this book any day over any other of the list of required reading in school, because it was just that awesome! Read the book, it’s a classical wonder, despite its scientific flaws and technical jargon. You can pick it up for free if you have a kindle on Amazon.com or order it online or at your local book store. It’s worth the read and you don’t have to fight through old English to understand it. Check it out, but that’s just my opinion.