'A Veritable Swiss Army Knife of a Book'

One needn’t be a literary populist, jettisoning all critical values, to understand that especially when young we read certain books for the pure escapist bliss of it. In my case, before and during puberty, that meant fiction by Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.G. Wells and, best of all, Jules Verne. Putting aside the will to impose arbitrary genres on books, what these writers guaranteed this young reader was adventure. Around the same time I was first reading Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) and Swift (Gulliver’s Travels) for similar reasons. Boys, certainly, and, presumably, at least some girls, enjoy tales of adventure -- of survival, courage and resourcefulness. Kafka comes later. 

A reader of Anecdotal Evidence, Thomas Parker, teaches fourth grade in Los Angeles and recently read Verne’s The Mysterious Island (L'Île mystérieuse, 1875). I remember my mother taking me to a matinee of the film version of the novel, with special effects by Ray Harryhausen and a score by Bernard Herrmann, in 1961. Naturally, I remember most vividly the giant crab scene. Around the same time I read the Classics Illustrated comicbook adaptation of the novel, and within a year or two the novel itself. Thomas’ review of Verne’s book, “A Boy Scout’s Handbook: The Mysterious Island,” is published on the Black Gate website and is one of the most entertaining things I’ve read online in a while.He writes with enthusiasm without a hint of sub-literary slumming:

“As for books, I recently read something that would definitely make the real desert island cut — Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island. It’s a veritable Swiss army knife of a book, full of useful hints and practical advice, whether you want to lower the level of a lake, make nitroglycerin, cook a capybara or construct a seaworthy, two-hundred-ton ship from scratch. It’s a book no Boy Scout should leave home without.”

 

I had forgotten that the novel and movie begin in the United States during the Civil War. That would have been a further inducement to this young reader/viewer, as 1961 was the centenary of the war’s beginning and I was obsessed with it. All the characters are Americans, which I had also forgotten. Like Odysseus, the survivors, led by Cyrus Smith, embody mêtis, what we would characterize as cunning intelligence. They even construct a ship and christen it the Bonadventure. (Edmund Blunden’s 1922 travel journal is titled Bonadventure, after the ship he sailed on.) Thomas acknowledges (as every reader should, though some will not) that The Mysterious Island was written 150 years ago and its author may not have shared our enlightened moral values. Thomas’ conclusion is worth quoting at length:

 

“[T]he thing that most marks The Mysterious Island as an artifact from someplace far, far away is an attitude and an assumption — every page shines with an optimism and unalloyed faith in reason (and faith in faith, too — the colonists frequently offer up thanks to their Creator) that have become increasingly alien in this decidedly non-Vernian far future that we’ve wound up living in. When was the last time you read a six-hundred-page book without a single cynical word in it?

 

“More than the complete harmony and lack of conflict between the men (there are no personal problems on Lincoln Island — all problems there are mechanical), more than the island being presented as a delightful puzzle to solve or an enormous toy box to open, more even than the total lack of the female sex (that not one of these supposedly grown men sees as a problem or even notices!), it’s this fresh, optimistic view of the world (call it naivete if you will) that marks The Mysterious Island as fundamentally a boy’s book. That doesn’t mean it’s valueless, though, even for non-adolescents.

 

“Verne’s sunny view of the world and of our place in it may not be strictly realistic, but it is undeniably pleasant, and even inspiring and possibly useful. We’re all shipwrecked somewhere, aren’t we, and when you find yourself cold and wet and shivering on the beach, you can curl up and cry and start dying of exposure or starvation… or you can inventory what you’ve got in your pockets, survey the landscape, and get to work. In fiction or in life, it’s not a bad philosophy, and there are worse tools to have in your box than L’Île mystérieuse.

 

“So just ask yourself — WWJVD? (What would Jules Verne do?) The sooner you get that telegraph built the better.”

 

How pleasant to read an account of a reviewer enjoying himself while reading a book. Some of us still remember those days and don’t condescend to our younger selves.