I could not 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 is kind of boring, and saying that about a classic is not a fashionable position.
The premise was never the problem. Three people are pulled out of the sea and held aboard a vessel that officially does not exist, by a man who will not explain himself. That is a good situation and it is still a good situation.
What the book does with it is the problem, and the problem is not confined to this one. Verne wrote political manifestos and wrapped a plot around them. There is an argument the book wants to make and the story exists to carry the argument from one end of the volume to the other, which leaves the characters paper thin. They hold positions. They ask the questions that let somebody else answer.
So the situation stayed and the vantage point moved.
What is wrong with Jules Verne as a novelist?
He wrote political manifestos and wrapped a plot around them.
That is true of every Verne novel I have read, and it is certainly true of the three that make up the Nemo books. There is an argument the book wants to make, and the story exists to carry the argument from one end of the volume to the other.
The cost lands on the characters. They are 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.
The book on this: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is Verne’s story retold by the harpooner, a man who does not 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 was not Nemo.
Nemo is the engine of the original and he cannot narrate it, since the whole effect depends on not knowing what he is doing or why. So the story goes to one of the prisoners.
Verne gave it to Aronnax, who is a naturalist handed the greatest specimen collection in the world and unlimited time to study it. He is a prisoner who does not 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 is a unique viewpoint, and I am 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 cannot be the cause. A reef does not do that. Something that moves does that.
The newspapers decide it is a narwhal grown past all reason, because the newspapers are written by men who have not been on the water. Ned works from the damage. Impact damage, at speed, with no follow-up strike, which means whatever hit those ships hit them in passing.
He cannot name it. He has a shape, a wound pattern, and a consistency that speaks of engineering instead of biology. That is enough to know it is not an animal, and it is where the book starts.
Who is Lakara in this version?
Nemo’s executive officer, and she is not in Verne at all.
She has 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 does not 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 does not notice.
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, which means constant speed, which 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 is not. The lock is a statement of ownership. The unlocked door is a statement of confidence. Together they say something complete. You are here, the door is open, and it does not matter.
A man who reads a hallway that way is a better narrator than a man who reads a coral forest.
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 quietly 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 is also a dog. He is 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 the dog is being fed by somebody who has not explained why.
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 did not 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 did not ask where she was from or what she was running from, because those are not 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 had done in the country whose name she carries and is finished with, stayed hers. That is the recruitment policy of a man running a vessel that does not 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 be honest about what he did and the reason he did it, because the honest version is more instructive than the version where he had a plan.
That is a working man’s standard for an account, and it is not the standard Verne’s Aronnax applies. Aronnax reports wonder. Ned reports what he tried, what it cost, and where his reasoning was actually improvisation dressed up afterward.
What is different about this version of 20,000 Leagues?
The events are Verne’s. The vantage point is not.
The frigate is the USS Susquehanna out of San Francisco, not the Abraham Lincoln, and her captain believes in the creature because he has 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 is 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 is still not explaining himself. The difference is that the man watching him is trying to get out instead of trying to write him up.
Where does 20,000 Leagues fit in the Victorian Era Series?
It is 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 do not need Verne to read this. It is built from the original and complete on its own.
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