Cussedness
The natural cussedness of things in general.
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A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
According to Adam Roberts, Jules Verne really needs the help of some good translators to enable monolingual clods like me to appreciate his works properly. I’m unable to comment on the accuracy of the translation of A Journey to the Center of the Earth that I just read, but even so, assuming that the plot is intact, I have to confess that I think this rather famous early work of Verne’s has not aged well at all. The introduction in this edition claims that the hollow-earth theory had some weight in the nineteenth century, and if that was the case then a contemporary reader may well have been entertained by the story, but for anyone aware of the most basic concepts of plate tectonics and planet formation the whole tale is completely preposterous, and I write that as a sincere fan of some fairly preposterous fiction.
I found myself continually brought up short by nonsenses, large and small, in the both the premises on which the tale is founded, and the minor details. By the time our heroes escape from the vast cavern running the length of Europe, via a live volcano, on a wave of molten rock, Verne has completely lost me. It is worth pointing out that I had no such issues with the scientific foundations of Twenty-thousand Leagues Under the Sea, where the innovations and ideas are all plausible and mostly differ from modern technology only in details of implementation and technicalities. For Journey to the Center of the Earth to be believed, even putting aside geological impossibilities, the protagonists would need to be completely fireproof supermen capable of carrying several weeks worth of supplies, heavy scientific instruments, and a small arsenal of weapons on their backs.I also found the characterisation unconvincing and inconsistent, although I would be willing to put that down to poor translation and give it a second chance in another edition. Axel, the narrator, is most unsatisfyingly portrayed, displaying bizarre mood swings, oscillating between craven fearfulness and bravado throughout. This could either be evidence of dodgy translation, or of a writer not yet in full command of his art; I am unable to say which with any confidence.
My main problem, though, is the basic silliness of the central idea of the story, encapsulated in the title. This is really a very subjective criticism, and other readers may well have no such difficulty. There are probably some who would consider it a shame that my rudimentary understanding of geology has rendered one of Verne’s most famous works unenjoyable, and that I should try to suspend disbelief. I would have to counter that the reality, that our entire civilisation, and the entirety of life on earth, clings to a nuclear powered ball of molten metal and rock on a layer of crust that, at around 0.3% of the planet’s diameter and mass, is proportionally much, much thinner than the skin of chocolate on a Tunnocks Tea Cake, is on the face of it a far more implausible idea than anything propounded by hollow-earth theorists. That it happens to be true is unfortunate for the believability of Verne’s story, but also shows that the limits of what a reader may be reasonably expected to accept as plausible, given adequate internal consistency, are more extreme than most people realise.
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I’m guessing you loved The Core then? ;)
To be honest, I read all my Jules Verne as a tweenie, so just went for the exciting battling monsters. Even then, I thought popping out of Etna a little implausible, but no more than the rest of it. He may have been serious then, but now it’s a jolly tall tale
Put it this way, if the narrator was a semi-drunk Irishman in a pub, you’d have been enthralled throughout, wouldn’t you?
2007-10-01 08:40
Heh. I bet your drunken Irishman would have smacked me one after my third or fourth pedantic interruption, and serve me right too…
2007-10-02 14:05