I have now done this three times. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, and this one. The pattern is the same every time. I reread the source novel, I admire what still works in it, and then I find myself staring at somebody the original walked straight past.
In The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne introduces Tom Ayrton in chapter thirty-one. He’s been marooned on Tabor Island for twelve years by Lord Glenarvan, as punishment for crimes against a ship called the Britannia, and he’s gone partly feral. The castaways rescue him, he integrates into the colony, he confesses, and by the end of the novel he dies defending the island he’s come to love.
Verne gives him about thirty pages and never once goes inside him. What Ayrton thought about for twelve years, what he carried, what the isolation did to a man aren’t in the book. He’s a plot device that a novel needed. First a villain, then a reformed villain, then a heroic death.
It interested me enormously. Verne’s choice bothered me more than I expected. Twelve years alone is the most interesting thing that happens to anybody in that novel, and he used it as a plot convenience. Ayrton deserved more than thirty pages and a tidy redemption, and giving him the rest of his story is the part of this book I’m proudest of.
What crimes did Tom Ayrton commit?
Verne never says, and that vagueness is the problem.
Ayrton mutinied. He did worse things. The novel doesn’t specify what, and I understand the choice. The Mysterious Island is an adventure novel for boys, not a moral inquiry, and the vagueness lets a young reader move past the ugly part.
But vagueness costs something, and here it costs the man himself. A character without specific crimes is a category. So I gave Ayrton his crimes. What he did in the years between his wife’s death and his marooning isn’t pleasant, and the novel doesn’t linger on the detail. That’s consistent with how Ayrton talks about anything. He’s precise about some things and silent about others, and he chooses which is which.
Those passages were the hardest part of the book for me. I didn’t want to hide behind Verne’s vagueness, and I didn’t want to wallow in the ugliness either, so I let Ayrton decide how much to say. He’s a man who knows exactly what he did, and I wasn’t going to let him off by pretending otherwise.
The book on this: Eurydice: The Confession of Tom Ayrton is a novel told in recorded sessions, in which the man Jules Verne marooned on Tabor Island for twelve years gives his own account of the crimes and the isolation.
Who is Eurydice in the novel?
Ayrton’s wife. Verne mentions no family at all. She died of a progressive neurological disease across four years before the marooning, and what Ayrton did for her at the end of those four years is the center of the book. The title is hers.
The four years matter because they explain the shape of the man who then goes to sea and does what he does. Not as an excuse. Ayrton would reject that framing and says so. As the thing that happened immediately before the thing that happened. Putting her name on the cover was an easy decision. Verne left her out so completely that she never existed, and everything Ayrton became grows out of those four years with her. I wanted her name in front of the reader through every session.
What does twelve years of isolation do to a person?
That’s most of what the book is about, and it’s why the story held me.
Loneliness of that kind is a set of conditions, and a person under those conditions has to do something. Ayrton had to decide, over and over, whether to keep being a person when there was nobody to be a person in front of. Verne records the result and skips the process. Ayrton is found partly feral, and the novel treats that as a fact about the island, not a thing that happened day by day to a specific man who could describe it. Ayrton can describe it. That’s what the sessions are for.
Was marooning Tom Ayrton on Tabor Island justice?
You’ll have to decide for yourself, and the book is built so that you have to. Lord Glenarvan handed down a sentence with no court, no term, and no review. He put a man ashore and sailed away. Whether that was justice, mercy, or something that only resembles both from a distance is the question the sessions keep circling.
Glenarvan’s sentence bothers me more every time I think about it. Nobody had to defend it, nobody had to review it, and nobody had to watch what it did to the man. That kind of punishment is easy to call justice because the person handing it down gets to sail away.
Ayrton has a position on it. He doesn’t offer his twelve years as penance and he doesn’t accept anybody else offering it on his behalf. The island removed the conditions that had allowed him to continue, and he’s precise that removing them never reformed him. The novel doesn’t resolve it either. I could have written an ending that told you what to think and I didn’t want one.
How is Eurydice structured?
As a series of recorded interviews, using a structure Verne suggested and never used. In The Mysterious Island, the journalist Gideon Spilett takes notes throughout and publishes the official account of the colony. That’s a whole apparatus sitting unused in the original, so I used it. In this novel Spilett sits down with Ayrton for a series of sessions, and the book is the record of them.
The sessions begin three days after the colony finds the Bonadventure’s position on the charts and understands where they’re going and what they’ll find there. Spilett is recording. The gap between what gets recorded and what happened is, as he says himself in the original, the correspondent’s art. Ayrton knows that. He’s chosen what to give the sessions and what to keep, and the reader watches him choose. That’s a different experience from being told what happened.
What are the conditions Ayrton set for the sessions?
Spilett proposed the sessions three days after the colony found the Bonadventure’s position on the charts and understood where they were going. Ayrton accepted.
The terms were simple. He’d speak, Spilett would record, and the account would belong to Spilett to do with as he determined. Ayrton had conditions. Spilett agreed to them. Neither of them ever specified what the conditions were. That’s how certain arrangements between certain kinds of people get made. The understanding is mutual and the documentation is unnecessary. It also means the reader is looking at a record shaped by terms nobody wrote down.
Does Ayrton admit he is unreliable?
On the second page, and so does Spilett.
Ayrton states plainly that he isn’t a reliable narrator of his own life and that Spilett is aware of it too. The sessions are therefore not a record of what happened. They’re a record of what he could give a journalist on a given Tuesday and Thursday, in the order he could give it. That’s neither chronological nor complete.
He gave Spilett more than he intended. He says that’s how these things generally go when the other person in the room is competent. What he withheld, he withheld deliberately. His instruction to the reader is that the withholding is there, that he knows where it is, and that none of it is accidental. That’s a considerably more useful warning than a narrator claiming accuracy.
What did Spilett publish, and what did he leave out?
Ayrton read the draft before it went out. His verdict on it is that the published account is accurate in the ways that matter and incomplete in the ways that matter also, and he’s made peace with both. That’s as close as he’ll come to saying he’s satisfied.
His summary of what Spilett published is deliberately flat. The castaway of Tabor Island sat in a room with a journalist and told him things.
Then the line the novel turns on. What the sessions couldn’t contain is what you’re holding.
Do you need to read The Mysterious Island before Eurydice?
No, and there’s a reason to read Eurydice first.
Eurydice is a prequel that then runs straight through The Mysterious Island. The events of the original happen in parallel all the way along, with the colony going about its business while the sessions continue.
So you get the same stretch of story from two directions and two books. The colony has its own events running alongside the testimony, and the two tracks light each other up in ways neither does alone. The novel assumes you could have read Verne, not that you have.
Does Eurydice give Ayrton a redemption arc?
No, and several things in the book are left deliberately unredeemed. What Ayrton did, what he felt about doing it, and the quality of what the fourth year on the ships produced in him. The island doesn’t absolve any of that, and neither does the confession or the death Verne gave him. I’m drawn to characters who did terrible things and then continue to live with them. Harding in The Mysterious Island. Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues. Ayrton here.
The redemption arc isn’t what interests me. What interests me is the quality of a life lived on the other side of something that can’t be undone, and the question of what an account of that life can and can’t accomplish.
How much of Eurydice is Verne and how much is invented?
The bones are Verne’s. The marooning, the rescue, the colony, the sessions, Lincoln Island, the eruption, the Duncan.
Everything else is mine, including the darkness, and the darkness was already present in the source. Verne looked away from it.
I didn’t look away.
I think that’s the only good reason to go back into somebody else’s classic. If all you do is repeat what the original already did, you’ve wasted the reader’s time, and the people it walked past are still standing exactly where it left them.
