Most readers meet Captain Nemo once, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and assume that’s the whole of him. It’s not even his ending.
Three books are involved, written out of order relative to the story they tell, and I think the way Verne stitched them together is more impressive than anything he put in a submarine. Most readers never find out, and they’re the poorer for it. They close Twenty Thousand Leagues believing Nemo vanished into a whirlpool, and they miss the man’s real ending along with the best character Verne ever wasted.
What are the three connected Verne novels?
In Search of the Castaways, 1867 to 1868. A search for a shipwrecked captain across the southern hemisphere. Along the way the searchers deal with a mutinous quartermaster named Tom Ayrton, who has betrayed them. Instead of executing him they maroon him on Tabor Island, a speck in the Pacific, with the promise that someone will come back for him one day.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870. Three men are taken aboard the Nautilus and spend a year as guests and prisoners of a captain who won’t explain himself. The book ends in a maelstrom off Norway with the fate of the submarine unresolved.
The Mysterious Island, 1875. Five escapees from the American Civil War land by balloon on an uncharted Pacific island. Improbable things keep happening in their favor. They eventually find Ayrton, who has been alone for twelve years and has lost the power of speech. And at the end they find Nemo, dying, aboard the Nautilus in a cavern beneath the island, and he explains himself at last.
So the third book resolves both of the earlier ones, and it resolves them in a way that reframes what those books meant.
Who was Tom Ayrton?
He’s the most interesting figure in the three books and the one nobody remembers.
In the first novel he’s a villain. He conspired to seize a ship, he lies repeatedly, and when he’s caught he negotiates his own life. The marooning is a mercy given to a man who hasn’t earned it, and it’s offered with a condition: he’ll have years alone to become someone else.
When he reappears eight years later in publication terms and twelve years later in story terms, the punishment has done something the book doesn’t romanticize. Reform is the wrong word for what’s left of him. He’s stopped speaking, moves like an animal, and has to be reintroduced to language and to himself.
Verne is doing something unusual there. The third book tests the moral arithmetic of the first book, where Verne offers solitude as a chance at redemption, and the answer comes back complicated. Something was salvaged. A great deal was destroyed getting there.
I find that the bravest idea in all three books, and Verne backed away from it. He showed what twelve years alone does to a man and then hurried Ayrton into reform and a tidy rescue, as if the damage were a plot problem to clear by the last chapter. That retreat cost readers the most interesting man in the series.
Does the Verne timeline hold together?
The Mysterious Island moved Ayrton's marooning back a decade and implies Nemo's guests left around 1853, though Aronnax left in June 1868.
No, and the contradictions are worse than a casual reader would guess. Most editions carry a footnote admitting it.
In Search of the Castaways is set in 1864 and 1865, and Ayrton is abandoned in March 1865. Twenty Thousand Leagues begins in 1866 and runs to June 1868, when Aronnax and the others leave the Nautilus. The Mysterious Island runs from 1865 to 1869.
Two things then break. The castaways find Ayrton in December 1866, and he tells them he was marooned twelve years earlier, in March 1855. The first novel put it in March 1865. Verne moved the date by a decade, because two years alone doesn’t produce a man who has lost the power of speech and twelve years does.
And Nemo, dying beneath the island in 1869, says sixteen years have passed since his guests left him. That puts their departure around 1853. Aronnax left in June 1868, one year earlier. So a man who was vigorous and commanding a full crew in 1868 is an aged and solitary survivor a year later, and the maths of his own account puts the visit fifteen years before it happened.
Verne knew. He was writing across a decade for serial publication with a publisher who had opinions, and he needed an old Nemo and a feral Ayrton more than he needed the arithmetic. He also couldn’t move The Mysterious Island later, because he wanted his castaways escaping a Civil War siege. That fixed the start at 1865.
There’s a second and more famous piece of interference.
Verne first conceived Nemo as a Polish aristocrat exiled after a rising against Tsarist Russia. That was blocked before publication over the diplomatic and commercial consequences, and the nationality was left blank in 1870. By 1875 Nemo is Prince Dakkar, son of a rajah of Bundelkhand, who took part in the 1857 rebellion against the British, and that revision makes his hatred of empire specific instead of atmospheric. Hetzel also thought the ending too bleak and had Verne add the Iowa colony.
That one stings. A hero lost his country because somebody worried about diplomatic and commercial fallout, and Verne had to wait five years to give Nemo a history at all.
Writers still get squeezed like that by the people who pay them, and it’s no less ugly for being old. I don’t hold the broken timeline against him, though. I’d forgive a writer bad arithmetic long before I’d forgive a dull book.
Why retell a Verne novel from a minor character?
My real position on Verne is that he wrote political manifestos and wrapped a plot around them. There’s an argument each book wants to make, and the story exists to carry that argument from one end of the volume to the other. The cost lands on the characters, who are paper thin and exist to hold positions and ask the questions that let somebody else answer.
I couldn’t finish Twenty Thousand Leagues for years and only got to the end of the original recently, because it’s kind of boring. The premise was never the problem. Three people pulled from the sea and held aboard a vessel that officially doesn’t exist, by a man who won’t explain himself, is a good situation and still is. What the book does with it is the problem.
So the situation stayed and the vantage point moved.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea hands the narration to Ned Land, who doesn’t believe in sea monsters, wants off the ship from the first hour, and counts hatches, days, and exits. Aronnax is besotted with the technology and functionally a willing guest. Ned never stops knowing he’s a prisoner, and that single change produces a different book from the same year aboard the same vessel.
The Mysterious Island is Gideon Spilett’s private record. A correspondent of twenty years keeps two sets of notes, always, because there’s a difference between what a reporter files and what he keeps. Once you accept that, a Verne novel narrated from outside stops being the story and becomes the published version of the story. What Spilett left out of the published account was the whole of Neb, because a close and equal relationship between a white engineer and a Black man wasn’t printable in 1868.
Eurydice is Ayrton’s, and it’s the largest gap Verne left. He introduces Ayrton in chapter thirty-one, gives him about thirty pages, and never once goes inside him. Twelve years alone, marooned as punishment, rescued and reformed and killed off, all as machinery for somebody else’s adventure. First a villain, then a reformed villain, then a heroic death.
Verne also never says what Ayrton did. The vagueness suits an adventure novel for boys and lets a young reader move past the ugly part, and it costs the man himself, because a character without specific crimes shrinks into a category. So I gave Ayrton his crimes. What he did between his wife’s death and his marooning isn’t pleasant, and writing it was the part of the book I’m proudest of. The book runs as a prequel and then straight through The Mysterious Island, so the same events arrive from two directions.
What does a retelling of a classic have to respect?
The events, and almost nothing else. A retelling that changes what happened is a different book wearing a borrowed title. The Nautilus does what it did. The island does what it did. Ayrton is marooned and is found. Nemo dies where Verne put him.
What’s open is interpretation, and it’s wide open, because Verne’s narrators are unreliable in a way he didn’t intend. Aronnax is besotted with the technology and keeps rationalizing his captor, a man in the grip of the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to him. Every scene in that book can be read a second way by someone standing next to him with different priorities.
A retelling that changes what happened is a different book wearing a borrowed title.
The other obligation is period voice. A Victorian narrator has Victorian assumptions, including ones a modern reader will dislike, and sanding those off produces a character who couldn’t have existed and who can’t make the book’s argument. Verne’s own politics were more complicated than his reputation, and the Nemo revision is the evidence.
I have no use for retellings that sand a Victorian narrator down into a polite modern one. It flatters the reader, it lies about the period, and it throws away the tension that makes a nineteenth-century book worth retelling. When Spilett or Aronnax says something a modern reader dislikes, I leave it standing, because the distance between his view and ours is half of what these books are about.
What Verne built without a name for it
Set aside the submarine and the balloon, which are what he’s remembered for, and the structural achievement is more interesting. Three novels, published across eight years, that share characters, honor their own consequences, resolve each other’s loose ends, and revise an earlier book’s meaning without contradicting its text. A minor villain from book one becomes a major figure in book three. A protagonist’s mysterious ending in book two is answered in book three by someone else entirely. That’s a shared universe, and one man assembled it in the 1860s and 70s for a serial readership, without a template to work from.
It also came with the standard costs. That’s oddly reassuring. The timeline doesn’t survive scrutiny. A character’s nationality changed between books for commercial reasons. The author was making it work as he went.
Every long series since has made the same trades, and most of them pretend otherwise.
My take
Verne deserves more credit for the structure than for the submarine. He tied three novels together across eight years, turned a minor villain into a major figure, and answered one book’s ending in another. His timeline falls apart if you check it, and that doesn’t bother me. Every long series makes the same trades. If you’re building one, plan for the cracks and stop pretending your continuity will be perfect.
Why these three books survive
Not the technology. That’s why people usually say they survive.
The Nautilus is a magnificent machine and it’s not what keeps the book alive. What keeps it alive is a man who has renounced the entire surface world, won’t say why for four hundred pages, and is holding three people captive out of a logic he considers self-evident. That’s a character problem and it doesn’t date. Ayrton is the same. A man given twelve years alone as a mercy, and what solitude did to him, isn’t a Victorian question.
The machines got built and outgrown, and the people are still working.
I think readers who remember Verne for gadgets have him backwards. His characters were thin, and they still outlived every machine he drew because the situations he put them in were that good. Ayrton waited a very long time for a book of his own, and I’m glad I got to write it.
The three books are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Mysterious Island, and Eurydice: The Confession of Tom Ayrton. More of the research behind the fiction is in the writing hub. The writing side of it is in how Eurydice came together.
Tom Ayrton got about thirty pages across Verne’s books. Eurydice is his confession of the twelve years alone on Tabor Island that Verne never wrote.
