Lockdown antidote
May. 11th, 2020 08:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiBook Review: Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
A few weeks ago, a friend pointed out some freely available Kindle books, and I availed myself of a couple of volumes. I don't think I've read any of Verne's books or seen any film adaptations, though I knew enough that the plot was formed on a wager made by Phileas Fogg at his London club.
To be honest, I found the story a bit lightweight. Clearly written for serialisation, in very regularly-sized chapters, this may be inevitable. The initial description of Fogg is at once enigmatic yet also superficial; and we really learn very little about the gentleman on his voyage. Perhaps nowadays we would describe his mechanicalness and reticence as being "on the spectrum". Nor do we learn that much about large chunks of the world; indeed, the story mentions almost nothing of his initial journey through Europe. Perhaps the intent was to impress upon the reader the smallness of the European continent and the scope of the Grand Tour, or maybe just to skip geographies with which some readers would be more familiar so that more pages could be given over to the exotic. The major episodes occur in India, China, Japan and the United States, as well as the final dash across the Atlantic back to Liverpool and then London. The slight of hand in the conclusion does leave the reader feeling a little cheated, with an arithmetic error that was somehow overlooked. Passepartout is Watson, clumsy but necessary, though the story predates Holmes by a good decade; Aouda is demur; and Fix is the pantomime villain. The natives are revolting, and kept in hand by good imperial British governance; the Wild West of the United States actually offers the harshest land environment in many ways for the travellers.
A few weeks ago, a friend pointed out some freely available Kindle books, and I availed myself of a couple of volumes. I don't think I've read any of Verne's books or seen any film adaptations, though I knew enough that the plot was formed on a wager made by Phileas Fogg at his London club.
To be honest, I found the story a bit lightweight. Clearly written for serialisation, in very regularly-sized chapters, this may be inevitable. The initial description of Fogg is at once enigmatic yet also superficial; and we really learn very little about the gentleman on his voyage. Perhaps nowadays we would describe his mechanicalness and reticence as being "on the spectrum". Nor do we learn that much about large chunks of the world; indeed, the story mentions almost nothing of his initial journey through Europe. Perhaps the intent was to impress upon the reader the smallness of the European continent and the scope of the Grand Tour, or maybe just to skip geographies with which some readers would be more familiar so that more pages could be given over to the exotic. The major episodes occur in India, China, Japan and the United States, as well as the final dash across the Atlantic back to Liverpool and then London. The slight of hand in the conclusion does leave the reader feeling a little cheated, with an arithmetic error that was somehow overlooked. Passepartout is Watson, clumsy but necessary, though the story predates Holmes by a good decade; Aouda is demur; and Fix is the pantomime villain. The natives are revolting, and kept in hand by good imperial British governance; the Wild West of the United States actually offers the harshest land environment in many ways for the travellers.