The latest novel in my now slightly obsessive quest to read as much Jules Verne as possible, Facing The Flag is a typical Voyage Extraordinaire. We encounter high-tech weaponry and transport, nefarious pirates bent on mayhem and destruction, and a hyper-intelligent eccentric inventor, all seen through the eyes of a slightly dopey French narrator. It even has an island submarine base hidden within the empty magma chamber of an extinct volcano, the third such example I have encountered in the Voyages so far. The story is well paced and culminates in a satisfying conclusion: classic Verne, and thoroughly enjoyable. (more…)
4 comments 2008-08-09 12:49 Categories: Books, Reviews
This anonymous translation of Claudius Bombarnac, entitled The Aventures of a Special Correspondent may not, I suspect, be the most faithful rendering of Verne’s original text. The eponymous narrator travels from Tbilisi to “Pekin” via the Trans Caspian Railway and assorted other rail and boat connections in search of a story to send back to his newspaper in Paris, and as far as the basic story is concerned, the novel is entertaining and enjoyable. (more…)
0 comments 2008-08-08 15:49 Categories: Books, Reviews
Like Lighthouse at the End of the World, Master of the World was one of Verne’s last works; it was published not long before his death in 1905. Unlike Lighthouse, it’s not very good. I don’t know any of the details regarding the writing of this story, or about the English translation available on Project Gutenberg, but Verne clearly wasn’t testing his abilities with this Voyage Extraordinaire. A sequel to Robur the Conqueror, it is flimsier that that already lighthearted work, with little to recommend it beyond a sketch of a fantastical vehicle, named the Terror, capable of high-speed travel on land, on and under water, and in the air.
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0 comments 2008-07-12 14:52 Categories: Books, Reviews
Robur The Conqueror lives aboard the Albatross, an “aeronef” - a platform suspended from thirty-seven electrically powered dual-propeller rotors, driven and steered using further propellors at the front and rear of the vessel - and spends his time taunting and flummoxing the rest of the world from above. He is a man of mystery, both in his origins and his motives, who arrives unannounced at a meeting of balloonists in order to point out how superior his own means of aviation is. Upon a less than enthusiastic reception, he kidnaps the president and secretary of the club, as well as the president’s valet. His reasons for abducting the members of the Weldon Institute balloonist club are unclear. Perhaps he wishes to educate them, to show them by example the folly of their ways, pursuing as they do the ridiculous avenue of “lighter than air” travel. If this is his aim he fails, and the kidnapped men do their best to thwart him and make their escape. The whole thing plays out like a flippant version of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, but above the clouds, with Robur a sketched caricature of Nemo and the three abductees a comic version of M. Arronax. Apart from the patronising, racist treatment of the black servant Frycollin, which is very irritating but par for the course in 19th century literature, it is an enjoyable, lighthearted novel, perfect for reading when one has significant distractions to contend with.
2 comments 2008-07-05 14:18 Categories: Books, Reviews
Verne’s The Mysterious Island is a cracking adventure story featuring a volcano, pirates, castaways and even some orang-utans. Set during the American Civil War, four Union soldiers and their dog find themselves stranded on an uncharted island in the Pacific Ocean, after a daring escape from a Confederate prison in a makeshift balloon, and a terrifying ride over thousands of miles carried in the teeth of possibly the fastest moving and largest storm in literature. Forced to fight for survival, the stranded soldiers start out with next to nothing, scattered across the island by their crash landing, but slowly gather resources and bootstrap their way up, determined to make their new home a self-sufficient colony of the USA. (more…)
0 comments 2008-06-28 19:43 Categories: Books, Reviews
The predominant image of the British Empire in popular culture of bewhiskered bastards mechanically exterminating entire nations of noble savages is challenged repeatedly in the history related by Jan Morris in Heaven’s Command. Morris tells the story from the point of view of the invading conquerors, rather than those invaded, and it is interesting to discover that the British didn’t spend all their time murdering innocents in a mad drive to conquer the world, and that the imperial actions of the early years of Queen Victoria’s reign seem to have been characterised by rather more altruistic, if misguided, aims. (more…)
2 comments 2008-06-18 11:18 Categories: Books, Reviews
This is the book referenced by Liza Picard when discussing the old cliché of Victorian piano legs that I mentioned a few months ago. Her report of the story is a little inaccurate: that particular exaggeration was apparently first used by the Victorians themselves, in reference to the perceived prudery of contemporary America, but was, ironically, modified over the years to refer back to its originators.
Inventing the Victorians is packed with stuff like this, and barely a page passes without some mangy old canard being blown out of the water. (more…)
0 comments 2008-05-28 20:32 Categories: Books, Reviews
Lighthouse at the End of the World was pretty much the last book Verne sent off to his publisher before he died, and William Butcher’s translation comes with an excellent introduction and compendious notes which explain the various problems engendered by this. Verne revised heavily at the proof stage, but Lighthouse never had the benefit of this process, and was instead knocked into shape by his son Michel as part of a settlement with Verne’s publisher Hetzel. (more…)
0 comments 2008-05-20 08:58 Categories: Books, Reviews
Paris in the Twentieth Century is one of Verne’s earliest efforts, written just after Five Weeks in a Balloon, and rejected by his publisher as unbelievable, and for having “a real goose” as a hero. Hetzel wasn’t wrong about Michel, who has all the appeal of a whining sixth-former, but his judgement of the plausibility of Verne’s creations was less perceptive. (more…)
4 comments 2008-05-18 19:36 Categories: Books, Reviews
The nameless feline narrator is the best thing in Sōseki’s first novel by a mile. Witty and sarcastic, he is a scathing observer of the humans with whom he shares the world. His thoughts on trousers as a measure of human achievement provide an excellent example of his opinions:
Had mankind been created with an inborn readiness to be content with inequality, I cannot see why, born naked, they should not have been content to live and die unclothed. However, one of these primeval nudists seems to have communed with himself along the following lines. “Since I and all my fellowman are indistinguishably alike, what is the point of effort? However hard I strive I cannot of myself climb beyond the common rut. So, since I yearn to be conspicuous, I think I’ll drape myself in something that will draw the eyes and blow the minds of all these clones around me.” I would guess he thought and thought for at least ten years before he came up with a stupendous idea, that glory of man’s inventiveness, pants…
I’ve heard that it took Descartes, no intellectual slouch, a full ten years to arrive at his famous conclusion, obvious surely to any three year old, that I think and therefore I am. Since original thought is thus demonstrably difficult, perhaps one should concede that it was an intellectual feat, even if it took ten years, for the wits of proto-rickshawmen to formulate the notion of knickers. (p245)
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0 comments 2008-04-15 19:53 Categories: Books, Cats, Reviews