Revertigo by Floyd Skloot

Author:Floyd Skloot [Skloot, Floyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press

To tell his most compelling stories, and create his most convincing characters, Jules Verne relied on a simple recurring premise: isolate a small group of individuals and have them undergo fantastical adventures in an alien, dramatic, threat-filled natural setting. “A world apart,” he called it in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, where the limited cast must rely on fortitude, ingenuity, agility of spirit and body, and teamwork to survive extreme conditions. No drawing rooms, no domestic dramas, no offices in Jules Verne’s best novels.

He worked variations on this fundamental setup, which in essence was the deserted island motif. In the case of my favorite Verne novel, The Mysterious Island, it was a literal unmapped, deserted South Seas island to which five balloon-borne escapees from a confederate prison camp in Richmond, Virginia, are blown during a long and ferocious storm. In the case of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, it was a submarine, the Nautilus, equipped to be self-sustaining as it wandered beneath the oceans without a home port, its only contact with other humans hostile and warlike. A mobile, submerged island. Journey to the Center of the Earth was set primarily within the planet’s vast underworld accessed from inside a volcano located in “barren landscape of Iceland at the edge of the world.” A network of caverns and passages permitted the cut-off characters to wander through earth’s hidden corescape without encountering other humans. In Around the World in 80 Days, Phileas Fogg and his manservant, Passepartout, embark on an intensely self-contained expedition that, while not literally stranding them in isolation, maintains them as a separate unit seeking to avoid any contact that might delay their progress toward circumnavigation of the globe in the specified number of days. They are a kind of traveling island. Or are, as Passepartout observes, “journeying in a dream” as they pursue their surreally insulated quest.

The premise alone didn’t, of course, ensure success. Many of Verne’s lesser tales made use of it too: the early novel, The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, involved the crew of a ship, the Forward, led from Liverpool by the doomed, monomaniacal John Hatteras on a demented journey in search of the North Pole. But Verne hadn’t yet learned to incorporate his prodigious research into his fictional narrative, or to use dialogue as a means of propelling action rather than providing information, and the novel failed to sustain momentum. Similarly flawed by belabored scientific and geographical data, sketchy characterization, and patchwork plotting was the bare, undeveloped late novel, Lighthouse at the End of the World, in which a trio of men deployed to manage the new lighthouse on uninhabited Staten Island, near the South Pole, found themselves combating a gang of piratical malefactors.

While his desert island formula might be guaranteed to captivate boyhood readers, to work on a skeptical sixty-year-old man in a fiction-reading slump, it had to offer depth of character and believability of action. It had to offer more than the surface razzmatazz of scientific, natural, or geographical exotica. For

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