Books on Film: The Dead

Having recently completed a reread of James Joyce’s Dubliners, I decided to rewatch The Dead, John Huston’s film adaptation of the story of the same name. Although I have seen the film at least twice before and read Dubliners countless times, this is the first time of experiencing them in close proximity to one another. Which makes comparing them considerably easier.

The Dead is the final story in the series of fifteen that make up Dubliners. It is easily the longest of the set, running to more than fifteen thousand words, and revisits many of the same themes found in the rest of the collection. Paralysis. Jealousy. Youthful folly. Alcoholic excess. Simmering resentment. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest short stories ever written.

The 1987 film adaptation of The Dead was the last film completed by director, John Huston, before his death later that year. It is the denouement to a career that spanned forty six years, including such films as, The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1961), Casino Royale (1967), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Escape to Victory (1981).

However, it is Huston’s debut feature, The Maltese Falcon (1941) that, for me, remains one of the greatest films ever made. It is a movie so engrained in my consciousness that even when I return to the novel (which I have read almost as many times as Dubliners), I visualise it in black and white, despite the rich palate of colours described by Dashiell Hammett’s prose. Sam Spade’s yellow-grey eyes shine through the greyscale like a character in a Sin City movie.

Old Yellow-Gray Eyes

The Dead is about as far removed from The Maltese Falcon as one can get. The action takes place during a Christmas party attended by the main characters, Gabriel and Greta Conroy. The party is hosted by Gabriel’s aunts, Kate and Julia Morkan. Along with their niece, Mary Jane Morkan, Gabriel refers to the women as The Three Graces.

The party actually takes place on 6 January, the Feast of Epiphany, also known as Little Christmas, or Nollaig na mBan in Gaelic, meaning Women’s Christmas, when the Christmas period was over (6 January is also Twelfth Night) and it was the turn of the women of the household to celebrate.

During Little Christmas, men would take on the duties traditionally assigned to the women in a variation on the Lord of Misrule Christmas traditions, where the masters serve the servants. It should be noted that in neither the story or the film adaptation of The Dead is there much evidence of the male characters taking on these roles, or contributing much to the preparations. They are too absorbed by their own petty concerns.

My 1st copy of Dubliners

On the surface, the story of The Dead is fairly simple. Gabriel and Greta arrive late. Gabriel is to give an after-dinner speech, as he has done at the annual gathering for a number of years. Gabriel works as a teacher and part time journalist. He fusses over the details of his speech, rejecting sections for being too high brow for the tastes of his audience.

Gabriel is teased by Miss Ivors for being a ‘West Briton’, a term of abuse used for those more interested in European rather than Irish culture. She tries to convince him to make “a trip to the west of Ireland.” He refuses. Greta tries to convince him to go, so she can return to Galway, where she grew up, but Gabriel tells her she should go on her own, or with Miss Ivors,  if she so wants.

There is dancing and music recitals. The character, Freddy Malins, shows up drunk, to the chagrin of the hostesses and his mother, who is visiting from Glasgow. Dinner is served and Gabriel gives his speech to universal acclaim.

As the Conways are preparing to leave, Gabriel finds Greta listening to the tenor singer, Bartell D'Arcy, sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ (a traditional Scots/ English ballad), as if lost in thought. When he asks here about it at the hotel where they are to spend the night, she tells him about Michael Furey. Furey used to sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ for her when she was a girl and they were courting. He died when he was only seventeen. Greta believes he died because of her, after he showed up to her house in the pouring rain on the night before she was due to leave Galway for Dublin. He refused to leave and already being sick, passed away several days later.

Greta becomes distraught as she tells Gabriel about Furey and cries herself to sleep. The story and film end with Gabriel standing by the window as he laments never having loved anyone enough to die for them. Snow is falling outside and Gabriel’s consciousness sweeps across the whole of Ireland, from the ‘dark central plain’ to ‘the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.’ Gabriel’s inner-monologue ends the film in a voice over largely taken verbatim from the closing words of the story (with changes from the third to first person).

A simple story it might be, but the power and the glory of The Dead and Dubliners in general is often what is left unsaid. What is hinted at and alluded to between the words. It is no wonder Ernest Hemingway adored Dubliners and used the stories as touchstones for his own short fiction. If anyone could rival Joyce in leaving things unsaid, it was surely Hemingway.

However, the film loses some of the subtlety of Joyce’s prose. Which is always the trade off when adapting the written word for the screen. What this means in practice is that the film version contains a lot that is essentially padding to bulk out the story to a running time of eighty minutes (John Huston’s son, Tony, who wrote the script notes that the first draft, an almost verbatim rendering of the story, came in at about a forty five minute runtime). Some of it works and some of it does not.

Watching the film with the story fresh n my mind, the elements I find most superfluous and more than a little hammy are in the treatment of Greta. In the story, Greta is pretty much caught unawares in hearing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ after so many years. This plummets her into the black mood that renders her mute during their journey back to the hotel. In the film, however, there are several moments where something someone says causes her to remember Furey and primes her for the moment on the stairs. 

Angelica Huston as Greta is fabulous in the role, but I find all the wistful looks a little grating as they lay it on thick for the audience. It’s not like the audience knows what’s going on, unless they are already familiar with the story. This somewhat dilutes the impact of the moment on the stairs.

Moreover, the depiction of the key scene is a bit on the nose with the way Huston is lit. In the story, Gabriel doesn’t recognise his wife for a moment, standing there in the semi-darkness. The film version leaves no-one, not even Gabriel, in any doubt as to who is on the stairs.

Where? There on the stair. Where on the stair? Right there.

The film also alters Miss Ivors reason for leaving. In the story, she leaves before dinner, but no reason is given, other than she feels she has outstayed her welcome. In the film, she is leaving to attend a union meeting, having already confessed to being an Irish nationalist.

Given the time in which the film was made and the febrile political situation in Northern Ireland at the time, as well as the financial support the IRA received from America’s Irish population, this is surely deliberate. A nod to nationalism: Of which, I think it is safe to say, Joyce would not have approved. One has only to read the Cyclops episode of Ulysses to find a clue to his opinion on such matters.

Indeed, there are these odd moments that seem to play into an idealised theme park version of Ireland found in the United States. It’s not quite leprechauns stealing me lucky charms and dying everything green, but the score can’t help but include strains of the kind of diddly-dee ‘Irish music’ you find in many tired, clichéd depictions of Irish life, from John Ford’s The Quiet Man to divers episodes of Star Trek.

The irony that Colm Meaney, who played Chief Miles O’Brien in both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9, appears as Raymond Bergin is worth mentioning in passing. The familiar Star Trek trope known as, O’Brien Must Suffer, includes Meaney being made to suffer through many of those tortuously clichéd Star Trek scenes (see The Next Generation episode, Up the Long Ladder, for instance, which is painful to watch).

The Dead is the epitome of refinement by comparison. Meaney’s performance is understated. He is very much a secondary character, but no true Star Trek fan can help but follow him as he dances in circles around the room in the background. As a Joyce and a Trek fan, I am always happy when the two intersect (as with the Deep Space 9, Quark, who, like the fundamental particle, takes his name directly from Finnegans Wake).

Chief (right), what are you doing here?

Mr Grace is the one character added to film who doesn’t appear in Joyce’s story. It has been suggested he was partly included to give him some of Mr Browne’s lines and make the latter  a more overtly comic character. Browne is the only protestant character in the story, which might also have something to do with it, making him more a more scornful character to play to the predominantly Catholic Irish American audience.

Mr Grace performs one of the set piece of the film, a poem he says is called, ‘Broken Vows’ (which facilitates one of Greta’s moments of misty eyed wistfulness). Sean McClory, who played Mr Grace, coincidentally, appeared in The Quiet Man as Owen Glynn.

Another set piece comes when Aunt Julia sings a warbled voiced version of ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’, and the camera sweeps the rooms of the house, alighting on various items, from photos and needlepoint, to vases, candlesticks and porcelain angels.

I feel these are the additions that Joyce would appreciate. Music was always a part of Joyce’s life. He might have been a successful opera singer if he hadn’t chosen writing (and his terrible eyesight hadn’t precluded sight reading). His books are filled to the brim with music and the moments of recital feel as much a nod to Ulyssean episodes like Sirens as anything else. It is easy to see how much John Huston was influenced by Ulysses (his mother smuggled him a copy of the book out of France when it was still banned in the US).

The other main criticism one might make of the film adaption is that it somewhat diminishes Gabriel’s place in the story. He is still the most important character in the film, but Joyce’s story is much more focused upon him. For the most part, he is as much a point of view character as others found in Dubliners (cf. Eveline, After the Race, A Painful Case, etc.). The comic elements around Browne and Malins, as well as the set pieces, defocus Gabriel centrality to a large extent.

However, Greta is much more present in the film version. Despite the hammy elements of her various reminiscences, Angelica Huston’s portrayal makes Greta all the more sensual than the rather staid woman found in Joyce’s story. Joyce wrote better female characters later in his career, most notably Molly Bloom in Ulysses. As Joyce largely based both characters on his wife, Nora Barnacle, it is apt that Huston plays Greta closer to Molly than the actual character in The Dead.

Nora Barnacle

Joyce very much based Gabriel on himself with Gabriel’s cycling trips to the continent to brush up on his French and German. Joyce’s degree was in modern languages (French, German and Italian). He and Nora lived on the continent for all but the first few months of their relationship. Though I can’t quite imagine Joyce on a bicycle. His eyesight was too bad for that.

Donal McCann as Gabriel isn’t very Joyce like. Joyce was tall and skinny. McCann is shorter and stocky. Although both Joyce and McCann died tragically young in their 50s.Yet McCann is perfect in the role and it’s as difficult to imagine Gabriel as anyone else as it is to imagine anyone but Humphrey Bogart being Sam Spade.

It has its issues, but the film version of The Dead is still satisfying to watch. To those of us who read and reread Joyce, study him and learn at his knee and who lament his reputation as being difficult and opaque and not more widely read as a result, any cinematic representation of Joyce’s world is gratifying. It would be nice if someone would produce an anthology from the rest of Dubliners, with different directors tackling one story each. However, it seems unlikely.

So other than Joseph Strick’s 1967 version of Ulysses, which I still haven’t seen, The Dead is about the best we are going to get. Joyceans celebrate Epiphany as the first date in the Joyce calendar and some even hold a recreation of the meal and celebration featured in The Dead. I will settle for reading the story and watching the film.

Then again, I was born on 2 February, which is Candlemass, Groundhog Day, and also James Joyce’a birthday. Which is a pretty good birthday to have. And a damn good celebration.

Other Books on Film

A Scanner Darkly
Drive My Car
Dune

James Joyce, about to perform Dirty Old Town (niche humour)

 

Books on Film: Dune

He is the Kwizatz Haderach 

He is born of Caladan

And will take the Gom Jabbar

He has the power to foresee

Or to look into the past

He is the ruler of the stars.

                             Iron Maiden, To Tame a Land

Dune, as Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, observed, is to science fiction what the Lord of the Rings is to fantasy (Arthur C Clarke agreed with him). And as with Christopher Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, Brian Herbert continued the Dune books after his father died.

As with Tolkien and fantasy, science fiction existed long before Frank Herbert entered the scene. Yet no writer before or since has done so much to enrich the genre. Every futuristic film or TV series released since 1965 carries at least trace amounts of Dune DNA. George Lucas ‘borrowed’ so heavily from Dune and other sci-fi worlds for his first Star Wars film that Frank Herbert created a tongue in cheek organisation called, We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas.

Tatooine, the Jedi, the Sith, the Empire and Imperial forces, as well as the Pit of Salaccc (a barely disguised sand worm) are all repurposed elements from the first Dune novel. Even more of it was apparently included in the original drafts for A New Hope, including reference to a shipment of Spice and liberal use of Imperial Houses, a la House Atreides.

The idea of imperial houses did eventually find its way into the various incarnations of Star Trek, through the Klingon Empire. There would be no House of Mogh, Martok or Duras (to say nothing of the House of Quark) without the influence of Dune. Moreover, the Klingon language draws significantly from the influence Arabic as used by Herbert in his world building depictions of the Fremen and their desert culture.

Star Wars notwithstanding, various attempts have been made to bring Dune to the screen, big and small, over the years. Before Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film covering the first half of the novel (Part 2 is due for release in 2023), there was David Lynch’s 1984 big screen adaptation, as well as the miniseries made by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2000. Both fail to do justice to the book. The Lynch film is a mess, partly because the studio imposed its own edit on the film (though personally I find most David Lynch productions to be equally incoherent), partly because it was made to conform to a standard of 1980s sci-fi films (compare Lynch’s Dune with Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Return of the Jedi, for instance, not to mention later films like Robocop). 

The ‘84 film, however, is a masterpiece compared to the version made by the Sci-Fi Channel at the turn of the millennium. While it manages to stick pretty closely to the plot of the book, it fails in almost every other regard. Despite a number of accomplished actors lending their considerable talents to the production, the whole thing plays out like an amateur dramatic society’s attempt to act out the novel while suffering through a series of hallucinations brought on by food poisoning. It doesn’t help that the sets and special effects are kitsch as kitsch can be. Like off cuts rejected by Babylon 5 for looking too cheap. It manages to make the Star Wars prequels for a moment (and only a moment) look professional and well thought out, rather than another fevered dream created by someone who’d apparently never seen the original films.

All of which makes the prospect of creating a new version of Dune daunting, if not a little insane. This book, which many consider unfilmable (though come on, it’s not Ulysses or Infinite Jest), has resisted cinematic fidelity for more than half a century. Why should it reveal its true self now?

Yet this version (at least the first part released so far) is a masterpiece and an instant classic of science fiction cinema. There are some changes to the book, which cannot be avoided in lifting a book from the page, but it hits all the main beats of the original narrative and far more is retained than one would expect. It is, for instance, a minor plot point that Paul Atreides mother, Jessica, is not married to his father, Leto. That fact though is included in the dialogue despite making little difference to the plot one way or another. It is such minor attention to detail that makes this seem like a film made with fans in mind. It’s possible to watch the movie without having read the book, but this feels, finally, like a love letter to Dune and its readers. Though like 2001: A Space Odyssey, a reading of the novel helps to flesh out the film.

While the 1984 version might have been weighed down by contemporary 80s science fiction, the 2021 update instead luxuriates in its homage to science fiction and fantasy from the last half century. The opening scenes on the planet Caladan seem to nod to the landscapes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and to the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones. The sleek, tall ships that land on Arrakis (aka Dune), clearly take their influence from the Imperial craft found in Star Wars (Dune perhaps returning the favour and stealing back from George Lucas). And who can witness the central structure of the Atreides stronghold on Arrakis and not see the Tyrell Corporation pyramid from Blade Runner rendered in sandstone?

Beyond even cinematic homage, however, are the references to recent world history. A Hollywood blockbuster about an imperial power overtaking stewardship of a desert world and its Middle Eastern inspired inhabitants can hardly avoid weaving into its tapestry elements of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. House Atreides brings with it an invading force and if the stronghold is not actually under siege (not by the indigenous population at least), the obvious analogue is with the American Green Zone established in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

Again, it is hardly important to the plot, but the attention to detail contributes to the world building and continues a fine tradition in science fiction of taking contemporary human concerns and transporting them to a sufficient remove in space or time so we can consider their implications from a distance. Even cinematic war tropes are threaded in, with Stellan Skarsgård’s portrayal of Baron Harkonnen borrowing so heavily from Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, you expect him to moan, “The horror.” at any moment.

Dune is perhaps more depressingly relevant than ever, written as it was by a man concerned with the environmental issues of his day. The desert might be seen as a metaphor for the slow erosion of the natural world. Even today, we see China building defences to prevent the encroachment of the Gobi desert into its towns and cities and sub-Saharan countries planting acres of trees along the desert for the selfsame reason. While the omnipresent threat of nuclear war might have abated somewhat since the 1960s, climate change is just as real and disrespectful of public opinion or political bargaining. Dune and Arrakis are manifestations of a world reclaimed by nature and rendered all but uninhabitable without survival equipment. We should heed the warning, but probably we never will.

The inclusion of many actors of colour and of Middle Eastern heritage to the cast of this Dune is important, though I’m sure the usual suspects were crying, “Woke!” like a nervous tick. Yet when we consider one of Herbert’s influences for the plot of Dune was the life of T E Lawrence, particularly the film, Lawrence of Arabia, where most of the Arabian characters are played by white actors in black face (most notably Alex Guinness, who would, of course, go on to play Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars), it is a step in the right direction. I always think we should take a tally of all the non Caucasian people who have been played by white actors in the history of movies, TV and theatre and when that amount falls into arrears with all the white characters played by people of colour, then the anti-woke brigade can have cause to complain. Even then, we should probably ignore them.

The Villeneuve adaptation isn’t entirely perfect. Jessica is a little too passive a character in the first half of the film and unlike the ideal for a witch of the Bene Gesserit. Paul likewise is a little too Emo. Though as he is fifteen in the book, his portrayal by Timothée Chalamet is perhaps a closer approximation to a sulky teenager than either Kyle MacLachlan or Alex Newman in the film and TV series respectively. Chalamet seems closer to the character described in the novel, although in reality he is only the same age MacLachlan and Newman were when they played the role.

No film is ever going to be an exact replica of the book. Nor should it be. Screen and book have different grammar and syntax associated with them. Like the difference between mainstream music and jazz. Though in rereading the novel, Frank Herbert was obviously influenced by the visual language of cinema. Dune is a book that moves from scene to scene more like a film than the fluid narrative structure of many novels, where one chapter blends seamlessly into the next. Dune often jumps in place and time with barely a mention of what happened in the interim. Like Ishmael’s journey from Manhattan to New Bedford, that is dispensed with in a sentence in the second chapter of Moby Dick[1], so House Atreides are on Caladan one moment and already arrived at Arrakis in the very next chapter.

It is therefore odd to think how long Dune has resisted a truly faithful big screen adaptation, given its cinematic construction. We can only hope this year’s sequel sticks the landing as gracefully as Part 1 managed the takeoff.

I am perhaps lucky in the sense that I have avoided watching previous versions of Dune until very recently and only after seeing the Villeneuve film for the first time. Both the Recency Fallacy and First Love Fallacy come into play. There are no previous versions to erase from my memory. This version of Dune is the definitive one. All other versions are poor imitations. Vive la Villeneuve. 

Read More (Books on Film Series)

A Scanner Darkly

Drive My Car

 

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[1] “Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford.”

 

Le Rayon-Vert

History, as historian, Howard Zinn, noted, is an infinite series of events. In order to tell any story, real or imagined, one must cherry pick from those individual moments to form a coherent narrative. How one decides which events to depict and which to omit is ultimately a choice based on demographics and the background noise of commonly held mythologies in which our tribe is placed at the very centre of things. There are no objective voices. All of human existence and experience is subjective. Or as Zinn reflected in the title of his memoir: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train.

Yet as Douglas Adams remind us in one of his typical aphorisms masquerading as comic wit: if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.  Or perspective. In a chaotic, non-deterministic world, it takes a sentient mind to find patterns amongst the randomness. We create meaning in the meaningless. We find shapes in signal noise like faces seen in clouds.

Such cherry picking can bring purpose or it can send us chasing shadows of conspiracy. All of us at some time lose our sense of proportion and our sense of perspective. It can be humiliating and disheartening when a long held belief is shown to be erroneous: When the fleeting cloud face deforms into a new shape, or the grotesque in the shadows resolves into something benign and mundane: To realise that the Universe never thinks about us and will neither mourn or even notice our passing. Our relevance is limited to the time in which we exist. It is fleeting and when it is over it quickly fades, like an afterimage of the sun.

Yet what can we do? We must find meaning in order to thrive; in order to survive. The following history (apt, given the double meaning of histoire in French) is of no significance or importance to anyone but me. Which is exactly the thing that gives it meaning.

I grew up on naval estates. Eight of the first twelve years of my life were spent living in and around Helensburgh in the west of Scotland, down the coast from the Faslaine Naval Base where my father was stationed. We lived there on three separate occasions, as well as stints in Plymouth, Birmingham and Barrow in Furness, where my brother was born. 

Helensburgh

I began my life in this area, born in the Vale of Leven hospital in Alexandria by the banks of Loch Lomond. Year later in Balloch, next to Alexandria, we would take our dog, Boomer, for long walks in the park where he could tire himself out. And, inevitably, throw himself into the waters of the loch at every opportunity.

This is where many of my formative experiences took place. I first read the Hobbit here. I first heard Queen here. Owned my first computer here (a Spectrum 48k+). Here I watched Live Aid. I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark at one friend’s house and saw pirated copies of Ghostbusters and Gremlins at another’s. I learned about new films from watching Film ’84, Film ’85 and all of its subsequent incarnations.

At the beginning of 1986, my father left the Navy after more than twenty years and we found ourselves in Eastbourne, on the south west coast of England. More formative experiences. Sea Cadets. Sailing. Visiting Herstmonceux Observatory with Astronomy Club. Seeing the Hobbit play at the local theatre. Discovering the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for the first time. Also discovering Jules Verne.

It happened because of watching Film ’86 or Film ’87. Barry Norman’s review for a film called, Le Rayon Vert. The film came out in 1986, but it might not have been released in the UK until the following year. The film itself was of little interest to me. What did interest me was the background details. The film was named after the Jules Verne novel of the same name.

The title was what fascinated me. Le Rayon Vert. Translated as, The Green Ray, it refers to the very final particles of light that radiate out from the sun at sunset. The phenomenon is rare and can only be seen under certain conditions and in certain parts of the world. On very calm stretches of ocean or incredibly flat stretches of desert. From high and dry mountain planes or in fight with no cloud cover obscuring the view.

There is an old legend that anyone who sees the green ray will start to make sense of their life. The idea beguiled me. I went to the library to try and find a copy of the book, but it is not regarded as a major work from the dozens Jules Verne wrote and our small, local library was unlikely to carry a copy. What I did find was a copy of Five Weeks in a Ballon, which I withdrew and took home.

Jules Verne has been with me from that time until now. I don’t remember if I even finished Five Weeks in a Balloon that first time. The text was small and in a book that fitted easily in my squat palm. I remember struggling through it and the memory is clouded as to whether I finished it or not. I think it’s likely that I kept renewing the loan period in the hope of completing it, but gave up at some point and returned it to the library in favour of something less challenging.

What I did have was a collection of abridged versions of the classics, cut down for adolescent readers. The Old Curiosity Shop. Tom Brown’s School Days. Ivanhoe. There were many others, as well as what are perhaps Jules Verne’s three most famous novels: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days.

These books I did complete. There was a sponsored reading week or fortnight in which they formed the core of the books I read in that time. It was a struggle. I was not a natural reader at that time. Amazing when you consider that as an adult I read between one and two hundred books a year across a breadth of genres. But if any writer laid the foundations on that long journey from faltering to accomplished reader, it was Jules Verne.

Verne was for a long time considered a children’s writer in the English speaking world. This is mainly the fault of terrible translations from the French in which he wrote. Yet if one considers for instance, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, there is much scientific detail included. It doesn’t quite go to the extent of Moby Dick, where Melville was essentially copying out, verbatim, oceanic and biological passages from textbooks, but it’s not far off. The abridged, children’s edition that I read in Eastbourne obviously excised much of these technical passages. Which is probably for the best. They’re hard enough to understand as an adult.

I guess the light soon faded on my interest in Jules Verne, as do all such fleeting childhood obsessions. It was only as an adult, inspired by Michael Palin’s Around the World in Eighty Days, that I returned to Jules Verne. Yet by this point in my life, I had become a literary magpie, fascinated by every new shiny object. Graham Greene novels. George Orwell’s fiction and non-fiction. Maya Anjou autobiography. Frankenstein. His Dark Materials. Jane Eyre. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books read again and again and again.

As such, my re-acquaintance and deep dive into Jules Verne’s novels has been slow. I reread 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days in their unabridged versions. I read From Earth to Moon and Around the Moon in a single edition. I struggled through the overlong The Mysterious Island. But there wasn’t much else to choose from. Despite writing many novels during his lifetime, very few are commonly available in English translation. Even once popular books like Une Ville Flottante, or A Floating City, are these days hard to find. So I did the only thing I could do. I turned to versions in their original French.

Actually, it was the other way around. My French has always been middling, despite studying it on and off since Eastbourne. But I had started trying to read more in French, having hoarded second hand Folio editions since university. Satre. Camus. Zola. All far above my level, but you can’t expect to go any higher unless you’re prepared to climb. So I read them. And reread them. And looked up the words I didn’t know. Which in the modern world, with access to resources like Wiktionary, is easier than ever.

In the meantime, I acquired other French language editions. Flaubert. Simone de Beauvoir. More Zola (I love Zola). A translation of Ulysses (difficulty level: God) brought back for me from France. I found online resources. I recommend ebooksgrauit.com, which has open source copies of many copyright expired books, including Verne, Zola, George Sand, Alexander Dumas and many others in a number of different formats.

Somewhere online I found a download of more than fifty Jules Verne novels and short stories and dove in. At the beginning I decided to go though hem in order of publication. Which meant the first book on the list was, ironically, Cinq Semaines en Ballon, or Five Weeks in a Balloon. Nearly twenty five years later, I finally finished reading it.

Along with the next book in the series, Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras, you find a key feature of Verne’s writing in Cinq Semaines en Ballon. As much as his novels are about the adventure or voyage being depicted, they are also about the history of adventure and exploration. Cinq Semaines en Ballon is about travelling across Africa in a balloon, but it is about the history of European exploration in Africa (with the destructive consequences of colonial exploration glossed over with depressing predictability).  Voyages et Adventures du Capitaine Hatteras is about the journey to reach the North Pole, but is also about Arctic and Antarctic exploration in general.

I soon abandoned the chronological reading order. Many of Verne’s earlier novels were serialised in magazine form and are long books as a result. My French remains middling and I need shorter books to retain the concentration levels. So I read some of his shorter novels in between Madame Bovary and Le Deuxième Sexe and a couple of books by Senegalese writer, Fatou Diome. At some point I remembered Le Rayon Vert and routed through the download folder but couldn’t find it. It is such a minor story that it wasn’t even included with fifty nine others freely available for download.

Yet Le Rayon Vert is out there. I found a .pdf copy of the book and downloaded it. I knew I would get around to it, but opened the file to check it wasn’t corrupted. And what did I find on the very first page, but reference to Helensburgh! The damned book that stared my interest in Jules Verne, that paved the way to my love of reading, takes place in the place where I began.

Why I didn’t abandon everything I was doing and read the book there and then, I don’t know. I was reading too much as it was. I was probably already reading something else by Jules Verne. So I closed the file down and forgot about it for a year or two.

When I did read it, a week ago as I write, the book featured so much more than Helensburgh. The bulk of the story takes places in and around Oban and the Hebrides. Yet it opens and ends on the outskirts of Helensburgh, close to Faslaine. But more than that, Verne makes reference to Leven, when I was born, and Balloch, where we took Boomer to run himself ragged. Clearly Verne visited the area. People living in Glasgow, twenty miles away, are barely aware of these places. To think that Jules Verne came to these places and was inspired to write a novel, even a minor one, is of great significance to me, even, and because, it means so little to anyone else.

The book itself is fine. It contains scattered references to the works of Sir Walter Scott and it seems to be a pastiche of Scott and other early 19^th century romantic novelists. Scott was at one time the most famous novelist in the world, although his influence had declined by the end of the century. He had a huge influence on the likes of Alexander Dumas, who was a contemporary and good friend of Jules Verne.

Le Rayon-Vert is the age old tale of a woman, Helena Campbell, being compelled to marry one man, but the man is a prize tool. She won’t agree to marry him until she has seen the green ray, which is a bit like wanting to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. She sets off in the direction of Oban, where conditions might be right to witness the phenomenon. On the journey from Helensburgh, she meets the man who she will actually marry. When the green ray finally appears at the end of the novel, the couple are instead looking at each other, the faint reflection seen in each other’s eyes. They are each other’s green ray, where meaning has been found all by itself.

Le Rayon-Vert is a very different novel from most of the others that Verne wrote (certainly of the ones I have read). Perhaps that’s why it’s not included with his common cannon. There is no race across the world, or balloon ride over Africa, or journey into the bowels of the Earth. There are no futuristic submarines or space rockets shot out of a giant cannon. The journey Helena Campbell makes from Helensburgh to Oban is one that can be made by anyone today. Although Le Rayon-Vert is included in Verne’s Voyages Extraordinaires series, it is as much a romance as it is an adventure novel. The voyage is commonplace rather than being in any way extraordinary.

Moreover, Le Rayon-Vert is rarely mentioned in reference to Helensburgh. The town’s website makes no mention of Jules Verne. Neither does its Wikipedia page. None of the people I know who have lived in Helensburgh or been there had even heard of Le Rayon-Vert until I mentioned it.

Where Le Rayon-Vert is mentioned is in the film of the same name. I did watch it ten years ago when renting it from Love Film during the brief period when receiving DVD rentals through the post was a thing. I watched it again after finishing the novel. 

It’s an odd film. Largely made up of scenes of improvised dialogue. It was apparently shot using a crew of four. In several scenes, the actors are caught glancing at the camera, which is impossible to conceal or style out. I haven’t seen any other films by director, Eric Rohmer’s, but it appears to be typical of his style. Glacial storytelling. Little in the way of scored music but lots of ambient noise. From what little I have read, Rohmer is a love-him-or-hate-him director. Le Rayon-Vert is one of a series of films that he made in the 1980s that are similar, thematically. I’d like to watch the others in the series.

Film and book have little in common narratively speaking, but share some of the same themes. Both feature women as their main characters with Delphine the analogue to Helena Campbell. Yet while Helena is a force of nature, Delphine is introverted and defensive against the efforts by her friends to talk with her. She spends the whole film on her own, even as scuzzy men follow her down the street. At Biarritz train station she meets Jacques,  who’s only marginally less sleazy, but the two end the film sat on a hilltop at sunset, waiting for the green ray. Unlike Helena, she sees the ray for herself (a terrible post-production effect), which suggest Jacques will be a fleeting acquaintance.

I’d forgotten the scene where Delphine happens upon a book club sat on a wall, discussing Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert and the phenomenon in general. She sits on a bench beneath them to listen. It might have even been one of the clips Barry Norman showed on Film ’86 or Film ’87. It’s a patchy film, but somewhat beguiling. Ten years after seeing it for the first time, there was much I remembered and even anticipated. It’s one of those films where you look up the actors on IMDB to see where you know them from and it turns out where you know them from is this film.

I prefer the book to the film, but it’s not a fair contest. The film doesn’t feature even one scene set in Helensburgh. Yet without the film, I would never have arrived at the novel. I would certainly have turned to Jules Verne eventually. I am too much of a sci-fi nerd not to have done so. But Le Rayon-Vert would have been a long way down the line. I might have stumbled upon it eventually, having finished all the other Jules Verne novels. Which would have meant missing a novel that is minor to the world, but more significant than the sum of its parts. The film is an essential link in a chain that leads back to the book and into personal history.

We find meaning in meaninglessness. Find patterns among the randomness. There is nothing mystical about Verne’s Le Rayon-Vert beginning and ending in Helensburgh, nor a chance reference in a Barry Norman program setting me on my literary way. I have seen the green ray in two different incarnations, but nothing has been brought into focus or the meaning of the universe revealed.

As with in English, I have become a magpie of French language novels. I will continue to plough through forty or fifty more Jules Verne stories, in between books by Zola, Sand, Rousseau, Camus, Irène Némirovsky, Stendhal, Dumas and a dozen other authors besides. Perhaps the path was always laid out before me. If it hadn’t been La rue Jules Verne, another route would have led me in the same direction. Yet in a world of such size, we cannot afford to think about roads not taken. This is where we find ourselves. This is where I am. Le Rayon-Vert has been my guiding star.