I added this book to my 2012 reading list for a couple of reasons: 1, it’s a classic I had never read, and 2, I was fascinated by the character of Captain Nemo in the film version of the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentleman. In the movie, fictional characters including Tom Sawyer, Dorian Gray, and Dr.Jekyll/Mr. Hyde go on adventures together aboard the Nautilus with Nemo himself, and the portrayal of both the man and the boat were intriguing. It’s modern technology designed in the Victorian era, a veritable steam-punk visual interpretation.
So upon reading the book, I expected maritime adventures, which I got plenty of. There were plenty of descriptions of deep sea aquatic life, beautiful scenery and of course, the lost city of Atlantis. The basic plot of the book is this: Boats traveling the ocean have been reporting a massive animal, possibly a whale or a narwhal, menacingly lurking in the waters. An academic, his butler, and a whaler board a boat to help track it, and after a confrontation with the creature they discover that it is not an animal but a submarine, controlled by the Captain Nemo, who takes them on as prisoners. When he learns that the one man is an academic, he treats him nearly as an equal, but explains that the men will never be able to leave the ship as no one can know that he (Nemo) is alive and controlling the machine. The three men stay on board for a while – enough to travel the length of twenty thousand leagues while under the sea – but eventually escape, after Nemo attacks a boat from his homeland, killing all on board, in retaliation for something done to his family.
In the end, I had lots of questions. What happened to Nemo and his family that caused him to exile himself to the bottom of the seas, and kill innocent people as retribution? What happens to the Nautilus and its crew after they hit the maelstrom? Does the narrator tell the world about Nemo, or do the men keep his secret? I wanted to know a lot more about Nemo – who he was, why he did the things he did – but Jules Verne left this pretty ambiguous, which frustrated me. I did, however, like reading about the technologies that Verne imagined in the 1870s such as breathing apparatuses, energy production, and undersea tracking. I wish the book had explored the character of Nemo more and described the undersea landscape less.
