Whilst it is only a
coincidence that I read Jules Verne’s novel Around
the World in Eighty Days (1873) whilst myself travelling, it is a useful
one and has shed some light on the text for me. Allow me to share my thoughts.
I read the first one hundred
pages of the novel here, amongst the supposed peace of my study; I read the
rest in the real peace of the countryside, the River Wharfe
rushing nearby.
I would not have had to pack
this book if I had got down to the text quicker. I left on my real-world travels
at the appointed hour but had for several days previously been putting off going
on Verne’s literary journey.
If it’s true that I read the opening
of the novel relatively slowly then it’s also true that I picked up the pace towards
the end. This is not insignificant. My own reading speed – created in part, I
think, by the pacing and structure of the text itself – mimicked that of its central
protagonist, Mr Phileas Fogg. The second half of our hero’s voyage is a lot
quicker than the first. For me, then, form and the reading experience mirrored
content.
In actual fact I often found
myself doing precisely what Fogg himself never does – lifting my eyes from the
page and staring out of the window at the world around me. The characters are
placed in jeopardy on nearly every page and episode flashes by after episode with the merest turn of the page. Eventually you run out of reading energy.
I would like to argue that what
this text requires of you as a reader is a kind of sustained inattention.
The politics of representation
in this book are complex. The episodes set in India, China, Japan and America
are all problematic in their own ways.
In the end, this is an exciting,
funny, absurd and troubling book. I found myself laughing out loud at that
moment when the narrator compares Hong Kong to a Kentish town. It is also a
little frustrating when Verne chooses to info dump – we are often told how
heavy a ship is, for instance.
There is, though, fun to be had here.
