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.