Review: Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne

Today, more literature.

Review: Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne

The author whom undoubtedly inspired me more than any other as a child was the French writer Jules Verne. I can’t claim to have read anywhere near everything he wrote, but I could always be found in the V section of the local library looking to see if anything new hand come back on loan. Verne was prolific writer, writing more than sixty novels during his lifetime, as well as a dozen or more short stories. The vast majority failed to get anywhere near our parochial little library. I found maybe three Verne novels in all that time of looking.

However, I owned copies of what are undoubtedly Jules Verne’s three most famous novels, Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Yet the versions I owned were part of the Bancroft Classics series, abridged classics for children.

As an adult I have gone back and reread the Verne triptych in their unabridged forms. You can see why, especially with Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, they are abridged for children. Twenty Thousand Leagues contains the kind of scientific and oceanographic detail that makes the sections in Moby Dick that Herman Melville copied straight out scientific volumes look light by comparison. Verne’s influence on both science fiction and the scientific world in general cannot be overstated.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth, the last major novel that I last year read unabridged, is far and away the least scientific of the three books. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea inspired submarine designers in the twentieth century and Around the World in Eighty Days has inspired generations to explore the world, including Michael Palin’s TV recreation of the journey in the 1980s. Journey to the Centre to the Earth, with its central characters, Professor Lidenbrock and his nephew, Axel, descending into the interior of the planet from the glaciers of Iceland seems today farfetched. The recent discovery of diamond formed deep inside the Earth’s mantle, hinting at water layers as deep as four to six hundred kilometres beneath the crust, has been muted in the media as giving credence to the plot of Verne’s novel, but any water that far down would be subjected to extraordinary pressures. I think we can safely assume that there are no oceans beneath the Earth. Nor could one walk from Iceland under the ocean as far as the Mediterranean, as featured in Journey to the Centre to the Earth. No dinosaurs swim in seas beneath the sea.

Yet whatever its factual liberties, Journey to the Centre to the Earth is a marvellous adventure novel. The eponymous journey takes months, yet Verne’s style, at least in translation, is fast paced and zips along. It’s Boy’s Own Adventure stuff, lots of perils for our heroes to overcome, wrongs turns and separation in the darkness and almost dying of thirst when the water runs out. There’s also more than one timely intervention, Deus ex machina, especially in their improbable escape up through the magma chamber of the volcanic island of Stromboli and into Southern Italy.

In Axel we have that rarest of adventure character, the abject coward. His uncle, Professor Lidenbrock, is determined to push on whatever the cost, but Axel continually tries to talk him into turning back to the surface without success. The relationship between the pair is much the same dynamic as to be found between Philleas Fogg and Passepartout in Around the World in Eighty Days.

Journey to the Centre to the Earth includes both a secret note written in a runic alphabet and an cave entrance that is only revealed by a shadow touching it at on a certain day of the year. This, along with the actual journey underground, have led some scholars to conclude that they influenced much of the writing of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Bilbo and the Dwarves are forced to flee into the goblin tunnels under the Misty Mountain and have to find a secret entrance into the Lonely Mountain, where Bilbo confronts the dragon, Smaug. Similar parallels are said to exist between The Lord of the Rings and Verne’s novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras. Note to self: Read The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.

The other day (yesterday, in fact) I wrote about being a completist when it comes to reading certain writers. Jules Verne should be added to that list. Sixty odd novels, plus the ones that were published posthumously, is quite a set of novels to track down, even more so than Emile Zola’s Rouqon-Macquart series. Like Zola, I intend to read the majority of Verne’s novels in their original French.

Only America and Russia can compete with the French for producing quality novelists. I’d take Verne, Twain or Dostoyevsky over Charles Dickens any day. Dickens has his moments, but mostly all his novels make me want to do is self-harm out of sheer boredom. Victorian life mist have been tough for anything so tedious to become a literary triumph. I own a complete set of Dickens books that are a family heirloom, but you can guarantee that I’ve be reading all of Jules Verne in fluent French before I get through Dickens. Hell, I’ll be reading Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Solzhenitsyn in Russian before I get through all of Dickens.   

Hollow Earth theories may have been debunked, but no one believes in Martians anymore either and yet we still read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds. We should. It’s a great novel. Which author’s influence has been greater it is hard to say. H.G. Wells probably wins through in terms of science fiction and the popular imagination, but no one has yet built a time machine. They have built submarines. The oceanographer and film maker, Jacques Cousteau called Verne’s novels his ‘onboard Bible’ and several cave explorers and scientists site Journey to the Centre to the Earth as a major influence on their chosen profession. Verne’s influence on the sphere of science runs deep. All the way to the centre of the Earth (yes, I went there).

Get it done.

The Completist

“Hey, hey, hey, we’re moving in the right direction now.”

The Completist

As explored in a previous article (see Obsessions), I can get quite obsessed by certain things. As we saw, I love books, both collecting and reading them. As is expected of the obsessive reader, there are certain authors that I read time and again and others that published in such prolific profundity that the challenge is to hunt down and read their every last publication.

Isaac Asimov, for instance, published over four hundred books in his lifetime, fiction and non-fiction, covering everything from science and science fiction to commentaries on the Bible and the Complete Works of Shakespeare. I don’t quite have the time or the money to hunt down that many works from one author, but I do have a dozen or so Asimov books so who knows what may happen in the future. The Foundation Series and his short stories though are done. You’ll learn more about science reading his book, The Left Hand of the Electron, than from a dozen Horizon documentaries.

Back down the echelons of the more manageable, I’ve been obsessed with Emile Zola ever since I read Germinal fifteen years ago. Germinal is just one novel in Zola’s Rouqon-Macquart series, which runs to twenty books and one short story. The rule here is that they have to be found in second hand bookshops. So far I have found only half (less one short story), although two of those found are in the original French, waiting for when my French gets a little stronger (it’s getting there, though Zola apparently uses a style strange even to native speakers).

Even in English though, the Rouqon-Macquart series is an amazing group of novels, grander in scope even than Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, featuring over  three hundred main characters from the same family. Germinal alone is in my opinion amongst the greatest novels ever written, certainly in my top ten, even up against some pretty stiff competition. 

To the best of my knowledge I have read and own mostly everything by Ernest Hemingway except for a handful of his later short stories and his first book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon. Actually, I also own, The Dangerous Summer, his second book on bullfighting, which I still haven’t got around to reading, given that I don’t exactly approve of the sport. Then I’ve read plenty of his stories and articles on hunting despite not approving of that either. I’ll eventually read both of them. It’s the completist in me.

I agree with Michael Palin’s assessment of Hemingway: we wouldn’t have got along, but he always wrote passionately. His fiction is as much a travelogue, from Kilimanjaro to Cuba, Venice to Key West, and his journalism gives one as much a sense of the First World War as his novel, A Farwell to Arms. As with Zola though, I think I read his best book first. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a brilliant novel, although long, capturing much of the confusion of the Spanish Civil War. If you want to start with something lighter, there is always the much shorter The Old Man and the Sea, which only takes an hour or two.

My favourite American writer though is and probably always will be John Steinbeck. In the Maher Hierarchy of Great Writers, Steinbeck sits second only to James Joyce. Like Hemingway, I think I’ve read pretty much everything of Steinbeck’s, from the well-known masterpieces, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden (my personal favourite), to the lesses known greats like The Winter of Our Discontent and In Dubious Battle, to his non-fiction gems, Once There Was a War, Travels With Charlie and Journal of a Novel. There a couple of earlier novels that I’ve not found yet and I got a bit bored with The Log of The Sea of Cortez, written when sailing the Sea of Cortez with his scientist friend, Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in the novels, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday). As with Hemingway’s bullfighting books, I circle back around to it eventually.

I can’t say enough in praise of John Steinbeck. He never wrote a bad novel (ok, The Wayward Bus wasn’t great), but he did write several masterpieces that no one can claim to be well-read without having read. Any writer who wants to know about narrative structure should study Steinbeck in detail. There isn’t a writer living or dead that tells a better story than John Steinbeck. Neither is there a writer who knows better how to end a novel. Steinbeck novels always end with a bang.

 

Then there’s Graham Greene. There’s two early Greene novels that have never been republished, at the author’s own request, which I will track down someday, but otherwise I’ve read pretty much everything. Greene was certainly more of a mainstream writer than Steinbeck, perhaps even Hemingway, but there are still perhaps half a dozen of his novels that remain master pieces. Certainly, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, Brighton Rock and Travels With My Aunt are some of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

As with Hemingway and Steinbeck, Green wrote a number of non-fiction works that are just as entertaining and enlightening as his fiction. His volumes of autobiography, Ways of Escape and A Sort of Life are revelatory on his highly complex character. He converted to Roman Catholicism, but led anything but a virtuous life, having an affair with a married actress, as fictionalised in The End of the Affair. He was a former MI6 operative, but also a habitual drug user, including cannabis and opium, the latter of which he smoked during his time as journalist in Vietnam, where his experiences led him to write The Quiet American, concerning the CIA’s terrorist activities in the country during the 1950s. The main character of the British journalist, Thomas Fowler, is as autobiographical a character as Greene ever created.

In reading Greene’s non-fiction work, Getting to Know the General, I first heard of how the country of Panama came to be and it’s worth repeating. Panama was for a time part of Columbia. Then the Panama Canal started to be built, but when the private American companies in charge of the project ran into financial difficulty, the American government took over the project, unilaterally decided that Panama wanted to be its own country and declared Panamanian independence. The country was then further split into the Panama Canal zone, run by the Americans, and the non-Canal zone run by the Panamanian government. Greene became good friends with General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama until Torrijos was killed in a car crash in 1981, even accompanying him at one point to speak at the UN in New York. Getting to Know the General is another hidden gem that most people know nothing about. See also, Journey Without Maps, Greene’s account of exploring the country of Liberia.

There are many other authors that I hope to one day complete reading. One Kurt Vonnegut novel, Player Piano, remains on my list, plus a number of his short story and non-fiction collections. I also have a great love for Alice Walker. I’ve read all of Walker’s major novels and some lesser known fiction and non-fiction. Like Zola, everything I have read by Alice Walker I have so far found in second hand bookshops, but there is enough left from her bibliography that I think I will have to hunt down through Abe Books and the like. Her most famous novel is The Colour Purple, for obvious reasons, but The Temple of My Familiar is even better, the narrative switching between a number of different characters, including Celie and Shug Avery from The Colour Purple.

I guess the common theme to emerge from this article is that I love reading writers who are also fascinating characters in their own right and Alice Walker has always fascinated me. She was taught at Spellman College in Atlanta by the heroic historian, Howard Zinn, married a Jewish man and moved to Mississippi, where it is said they were the first ‘interracial couple’ (I’ve never really understood that term, as simplistic and idiotic as all ‘racial’ language) in Mississippi and had a relationship with the singer, Tracey Chapman. Aside from one small collection essays, I read nothing of Walker’s non-fiction. The joy of reading is in the anticipation of books yet unread.

On a final note, I’m currently halfway through The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell. A more inaccurate title for a book can rarely have been conceived, with section titles including The Epistemologist, The Metaphysician and The Philosopher and Expositor of Science. Russell was also a prolific writer of books, mostly non-fiction, and I have for years hunted down titles such as Political Ideals, Sceptical Ideals, On Praise of Idleness and The ABC of Relativity in second hand bookshops, although it’s been a while since I found new one.

Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is a masterpiece and an excellent introduction to the subject. Philosophy and physics have been at odds for years with each rarely even pretending to understand the other, despite both disciplines being subordinate to mathematics. Bertrand Russell was that rarest of breeds, a man who bridged the gap between mathematics, physics, philosophy, logic and linguistics and time spent in Russell’s company is time never wasted. A proper, full review of The Basic Writings will follow in a week or so.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should also say that there are still a few minor Shakespeare plays I’ve not yet read. I’m savouring them.

Get it done. 

Perseverance

Time to get back on track:

Perseverance

As much as I can be said to possess any positive qualities, I would say that my two greatest skills are that 1) once I learn something, I know if for all time (with some minor revision), and 2) that if I really want to know or be able to do something, I persevere with it until it is done.

That perseverance can take twenty years or more, but I get there in the end. It took me fourteen years to give up smoking, almost from the day I started smoking at sixteen until the day I finally gave up at thirty. I used to give up two or three times a week for an hour or two, until the withdrawal kicked in and I’d go scurrying off to the shops. Even in the final year of school, my friend and me would vow to give up smoking walking out of the school gates and be coppering up for fags by the time we got near home.

At thirty, something changed and I finally quit. Aside from a couple of drags on tobacco laden joints, I haven’t had a cigarette in eleven years. To anyone looking to quit, I can only repeat the advice that an ex-smoker gave me as I was going through my finally successful attempt: Get through the first three hours, then the first three days, then the first three weeks and then you are done with it and out. It’s good advice. The geometric progression appeals to the mathematical part of my brain. Time doubling up at each stage until the nicotine is out of your system. I persevered and it finally got done, probably early enough in my life to suffer no long term lasting damage to my body.

The same applies to languages. I, like most people born in an English speaking country, have no natural aptitude for language. I’m an expert in the English language, I know many of its tricks and my study of the works of James Joyce have left me with an appreciation for the mechanics of language to the point where I can usually say not only what I want to say but pick the way to say it that is most appropriate to the situation.

In many ways, English suffers from its own success. It is probably the most versatile language in the world. I often notice that in writing a sentence, even a single clause in a sentence, the same idea can be expressed in as many as a dozen different ways. English is built upon the vocabulary and grammar of so many different languages, Saxon, French, Greek, Latin etc., that it has achieved unparalleled power in the world. There are more widely spoken languages in the world, but English in the international business language, which effectively makes it the most powerful language in the world. So why bother to learn anything else?

Like most British people, I learnt French at school and was useless at it. Maths I can do in my sleep. It’s just a bunch of rules you have to learn and apply. Language has many more shades of grey. Yet I would always feel like a failure if I didn’t learn to speak at least one other language, no matter how inept I am at languages. I’ve been trying to get the hang of French now, on and off, for over twenty years.

In learning another language you are really learning about your own language. Which is what takes the time to become bilingual. If perseverance if one of my greatest skills, then one of my more annoying flaws if that I have to learn every last thing about something before I can learn any of it. At university studying physics, simply not knowing how to properly pronounce the name of a Greek letter could throw my understanding of an equation right off. In learning French, the problem has always been that the translations given of certain words and phrases are obviously not the literal translation, but an approximation, and this always thrown me off. I need to know the literal translation and history of that phrase or word. If I’m going to speak another language then I want to be able to think like a speaker of that language, not just do a poor impersonation of one.

I persevere with French for two very good reasons. One is that French is one of the cornerstones of the English language. Most of us already speak an adapted version of French. Every time you talk of eating beef or pork, of regarding something or of putting a cordon around something, you are using words left over from the French conquest of England in 1066. I persevere with French for the same reason that I’ve taken to teaching myself Latin and Classical Greek, because in learning its founding languages I gain a better understanding of English itself.

The other reason I persevere with French is that there are so many French writers, Emile Zola, Sartre, Rousseau, Rimbaud, that I’ve read and love in translation and want to read in their native language, as they were written with the right rhythms and shades of meaning. I am currently reading Le Mur, a collection of short stories by John-Paul Sartre and finding that I am understanding about half of it. That’s progress and a sign of what perseverance can do. I have this fantasy, which I also kind of know to be true, that it will have taken me twenty years to become bilingual and then learn four or five languages in a only a couple of years. More than French authors, my true linguistic ambition is to be able to read Chekov and Dostoyevsky in their native tongues. However, one step at a time. French first. I’ll work my way up to Russian.

For anyone who want to learn a new language but possesses my level ineptitude, here’s a few things I’ve learnt. Firstly, learn body parts, the five senses and types of thought. Any language is after all an attempt at telepathy, to communicate what is in your head for another person to understand, and so the first job is to define who you are in that language. Start with the head, the trunk, the arms and legs, moving to the eyes, ears, nose, fingers and toes etc. Then see, hear, speak, read, write, think. Also, probably the most important word in any language and the one usually with a multitude of changing forms is the verb, to be. Get that one down before all others. So many other words are invariably based around the verb, to be.

The other piece of advice I can offer as a writer is to immediately disregard the nouns and verbs. Verbs nouns and their associate adjectives and adverbs make up the bulk of any language and just have to be learnt. However, as discussed in a previous article, while function words (articles, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns) account for only a handful of words in any given language, they can make up as much as half of all text and speech. Learn them first and keep refreshing your memory at regular intervals and you will find that you will at least be able to get the sense of any piece of written text. It’ll stand you in good stead as you go through learning everything else.

I guess the most difficult thing I have found to persevere at has been as a writer. I wanted to be a writer from the age of about sixteen and yet it took me until my mid thirties to find myself comfortable enough to be able to write. It’s back to that need to know everything in order to know anything. I wanted everything to be perfect first time without effort and as long as I had to try at writing, I found I couldn’t write. Part of the reason for trying to write and post new articles everyday has been to train my brain to sit down with the shape of an article in mind and be able to colour in that shape on the page in a single session. Of late I have got lazy and found myself digging around old journals and notebooks looking for something half decent to post, simply because I don’t feel like writing today. Yet the point of this exercise is to write every day, not just edit old stuff. I’m pleased to say that this entire article is being written off the top of my head, from scratch, in a single writing session, with little more than a title and a rough shape for what I want to write. Because I persevere and I always get there in the end.

Perseverance, it’s not just a song by Terrorvision about whales and dolphins. It’s also necessary in learning a new skill or to becoming an artist. If it doesn’t happen first time, no matter. Keep going, keep trying, even if you’re useless at it. I’ve been learning guitar on and off for thirty years and I’m still appalling. But I’ll keep persevering for the simple enjoyment that playing brings me. Which is all anyone can really expect out of life.

See Also (click link)

Functional Content

Get it done.