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jtjfalk 's review for:
Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers
by Jules Verne
Ever since living in Nantes, Verne's hometown, I have been meaning to read some of his work. In many ways it is a product of its time, revelling in descriptive adventure episodes that were probably a lot more exciting to kids in the nineteenth century who probably had never encountered any of these places or ideas about the world. While there's definitely some ideas that are disproven by our modern scientific knowledge, there is a clear intention to being a hard-science encyclopedic account of the oceans.
The protagonist, Dr Arronax, is not much of a character, but rather a passive observer swept up in someone else's adventure. There's definitely a parallel to Ishmael and Ahab, but in Moby Dick Ishmael is much more developed as a character, even if he is relegated to a secondary narrative role. It's actually quite striking here how little control the three castaways have over the events of the story- they merely observe and react to where the Nautilus takes them. Paradoxically, Nemo is the only real character of the book despite being shrouded almost entirely by mystery. The glimpses we get of him are fascinating- his enormous library, museum of treasures of the deep, portraits of John Brown and other anti-imperialist revolutionaries. It really makes sense how we gets characterized by Alan Moore in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as a sort of super-terrorist of the high seas.
The protagonist, Dr Arronax, is not much of a character, but rather a passive observer swept up in someone else's adventure. There's definitely a parallel to Ishmael and Ahab, but in Moby Dick Ishmael is much more developed as a character, even if he is relegated to a secondary narrative role. It's actually quite striking here how little control the three castaways have over the events of the story- they merely observe and react to where the Nautilus takes them. Paradoxically, Nemo is the only real character of the book despite being shrouded almost entirely by mystery. The glimpses we get of him are fascinating- his enormous library, museum of treasures of the deep, portraits of John Brown and other anti-imperialist revolutionaries. It really makes sense how we gets characterized by Alan Moore in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as a sort of super-terrorist of the high seas.