I couldn’t finish this book. I tried more than once across a lot of years and only got to the end of Verne’s original recently, because it’s kind of boring, and saying that about a classic isn’t a fashionable position.
The premise was never the problem. Three people are pulled out of the sea and held aboard a vessel that officially doesn’t exist, by a man who won’t explain himself. That’s a good situation and it’s still a good situation.
What Verne does with it is the problem, and it’s bothered me for years. He had three prisoners aboard the strangest vessel ever built and he used them as an audience for a lecture. A situation that good deserved people who wanted something, and I think he wasted it. So the situation stayed and the vantage point moved.
What’s wrong with Jules Verne as a novelist?
He wrote political manifestos and wrapped a plot around them. That’s true of every Verne novel I’ve read, and it’s certainly true of the three that make up the Nemo books. There’s an argument the book wants to make, and the story exists to move the argument from one end of the volume to the other.
The cost lands on the characters. They’re paper thin. They exist to hold positions, to ask the questions that let somebody else answer, and to move the plot to the next place where the argument can be advanced.
Verne was doing something deliberate and it worked for the readership he had. It leaves a modern reader with a strong situation and nobody inside it, and I think that’s why so many people abandon the book the way I did. They blame themselves for failing to appreciate a classic, when the fault sits with the book.
The book on this: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Verne’s story retold by the harpooner, a man who doesn’t believe in sea monsters and wants off the Nautilus from the first hour.
Why is Ned Land the narrator instead of Professor Aronnax?
Because the book needed a central character who wasn’t Nemo.
Nemo drives the original and he can’t narrate it, since the whole effect depends on not knowing what he’s doing or why. So the story goes to one of the prisoners. Verne gave it to Aronnax, who’s a naturalist handed the greatest specimen collection in the world and unlimited time to study it. He’s a prisoner who doesn’t much want to leave. That produces pleasant description and no pressure.
Ned wants out from the first hour and never stops. Everything he sees, he assesses for whether it helps him get off the ship. The same coral forest that makes Aronnax reach for his notebook makes Ned measure distances.
It’s a unique viewpoint, and I’m drawn to unique viewpoints. Handing the story to the person with the most to lose changes what the book is about without changing a single event in it.
How does Ned Land work out what the Nautilus is?
From the wound pattern, before he ever sees it. Three ships come into port with their hulls staved in, from three separate locations, with damage consistent enough that the location can’t be the cause. A reef doesn’t do that. Something that moves does that. The newspapers decide it’s a narwhal grown past all reason, because men who haven’t been on the water write the newspapers. Ned works from the damage. Impact damage, at speed, with no follow-up strike. That means whatever hit those ships hit them in passing.
He can’t name it. He’s a shape, a wound pattern, and a consistency that speaks of engineering instead of biology. That’s enough to know it isn’t an animal, and it’s where the book starts.
Does Captain Nemo have a first officer in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?
Nemo’s executive officer, and she isn’t in Verne at all. She’s been aboard since 1853. She runs the ship the way a first officer runs a ship, and her attention is the thing that makes escape difficult. Ned finds the equipment room on day six and gets about forty seconds with it before she appears at the door.
Ned doesn’t know her name. Lakara is what he calls her in his own head, because a person you need to understand deserves a name, and the name is what the quality of her suggested to him.
She assessed him in the first sixty seconds on the hull. Large, calm under unexpected circumstances, counting before he stopped moving. Two people sizing each other up and both being right is a better engine than a guard who doesn’t notice. Lakara was the character I enjoyed writing most. Verne never gave Nemo anybody who could look back at the prisoners and do the same arithmetic they were doing, and adding her felt like repairing a hole in the original.
What does Ned Land count?
Everything that would help him leave, and he starts in the first hour.
Not the days. Those come later. The sounds come first. Footsteps in the corridor outside, a rotation every four hours based on the two changes he hears before he falls asleep. The drive frequency, consistent. That means constant speed. That means a destination instead of wandering.
His conclusion about the door is the sharpest thing in the early chapters. One room on the ship is locked and his isn’t. The lock is a statement of ownership. The unlocked door is a statement of confidence. Together they say something complete. You’re here, the door is open, and it doesn’t matter.
A man who reads a hallway that way is a better narrator than a man who reads a coral forest.
I loved writing a narrator who reads a room like a prisoner. Every observation he makes has something riding on it, and that pressure is exactly what Verne’s professor never had.
Who else is aboard the Nautilus?
Conseil, Aronnax’s servant in the original, is doing his own version of the same work.
He notices different things from different positions and starts handing over what he sees without being asked. A crewman the prisoners call the Mechanic has been giving something to the dog. Conseil watched it happen from a doorway, twice, and picked up the man’s name from an acoustic position where he could hear the crew talking.
There’s also a dog. He’s called Skipper, he goes into the water with them, and he ends up on the ship. Two of the three prisoners are building an intelligence picture and somebody who hasn’t explained why is feeding the dog. Aronnax, meanwhile, is being handed the greatest specimen collection in the world and is learning, slowly, to give Ned the layout along with the wonder.
How was Lakara recruited?
Nemo didn’t ask her anything.
Her one recorded exchange with him is short. Something in her settled, the way a calculation settles when the final number arrives, and she asked when they were leaving. He asked her name. Lakara, she said. Lakara Sue.
He didn’t ask where she was from or what she was running from, because those aren’t things he asks. He offered what he had to offer, she took it, and the taking was the whole of the contract. Whatever she had been, and whatever she’d done in the country whose name she carries and is finished with, stayed hers. That’s the recruitment policy of a man running a vessel that doesn’t officially exist, and it explains the crew better than any speech would.
Is Ned Land honest about his own motives?
More than most narrators are, and he says why.
Seventeen days in, before the first real attempt, he stops to tell the reader that he wants to say what he did and why he did it, because the real version is more instructive than the version where he had a plan.
That’s a working man’s standard for an account, and it isn’t the standard Verne’s Aronnax applies. Aronnax reports wonder. Ned reports what he tried, what it cost, and where his reasoning was improvisation dressed up afterward.
I like Ned more for that confession than for anything else he does. Narrators who pretend they had a plan all along are cheating the reader, and I’ve never trusted them.
What’s different about this version of 20,000 Leagues?
The events are Verne’s. The vantage point isn’t.
Narrators who pretend they had a plan all along are cheating the reader, and I’ve never trusted them.
The frigate is the USS Susquehanna out of San Francisco, not the Abraham Lincoln, and her captain believes in the creature because he’s made the mistake of reading the newspapers. The ship is hulled, three men and a dog go into the water, and they come up inside the Nautilus. From there the book runs on what Ned notices in unobserved hours. Hatches, doors, the one interior room that’s locked when nothing else on the ship needs a lock, the position of the crew, how many seconds he gets before somebody arrives.
Nemo is still Nemo and he’s still not explaining himself. The difference is that the man watching him is trying to get out instead of trying to write him up.
| Aspect | Verne’s original | This version |
|---|---|---|
| Narrator | Professor Aronnax, a naturalist | Ned Land, a harpooner |
| Attitude to captivity | A prisoner who doesn’t much want to leave | Wants out from the first hour |
| What gets noticed | A coral forest worth a notebook entry | Distances, hatches, doors, exits, crew positions |
| Standard of the account | Reports wonder | Reports what he tried and what it cost |
| The frigate | The Abraham Lincoln | The USS Susquehanna out of San Francisco |
| Nemo’s crew | Nobody who looks back at the prisoners | An executive officer aboard since 1853, Lakara |
| The events | Verne’s | Verne’s, seen from a new vantage point |
My take
Ned Land is the right narrator for this story, and Verne picked the wrong one. A harpooner who doesn’t believe in sea monsters and counts hatches and exits from the first hour turns a slow book into an escape plan. I never finished the original until recently because it bored me. If it bored you too, read this one. Nemo stays strange, and the crew finally gets faces.
Where does 20,000 Leagues fit in the Victorian Era Series?
It’s book one of three about Nemo.
Twenty Thousand Leagues, then The Mysterious Island, then Eurydice. The Time Machine sits alongside them as a standalone. Each one started the same way. I reread the source, I found the argument it was really making, and I found somebody in it who had been given nothing to do. Ned here. Ayrton in Eurydice.
You don’t need Verne to read this. It’s built from the original and complete on its own.
I’d rather readers meet Nemo through Ned than through a naturalist taking notes. A story about captivity belongs to the man who wants out, and Verne gave it to the one man aboard who was happy to stay.
Ned Land narrates my version, a harpooner who doesn’t believe in sea monsters and ends up a prisoner aboard a ship that doesn’t exist, counting the days.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Part 1, Chapter 4: Ned Land, Lit2Go, University of South Florida
