The Mysterious Island

One of the benefits of being part of a parish book club is that it makes me read books I would otherwise probably never read - like, for example, this month's selection by Jules Verne (1828-1905), The Mysterious Island (1875), tr. Jordan Stump (Random House, 2001).

It is easy to appreciate why a technology-loving 19th-century audience might have been taken with this novel. That was when the industrial age was most celebrated, and Jules Verne was certainly one to express that celebratory spirit. Of course, even in the 19th century, the Romantic movement revealed reservations about progress, but the overall direction of the 19th-century saw modernity, science, and technology as benefits to be celebrated. For many of us in the 21st century, however, when even space exploration has lost a lot of its luster, the triumph of the industrial age has long worn off. We are as apt to be bored by Verne's castaways' creative inventiveness as his earlier readers were excited by that aspect of the story. I know I was! As a result, I found much of what was probably meant to be an exciting adventure somewhat tedious. (It doesn't help, of course, that we are dealing with a 19th-century, originally serialized novel.) The tedious passages describing the seemingly endless succession of lucky chances and technological accomplishments call for patience on the reader's part. That patience will be rewarded as the final chapters of the story become more adventurous - and more surprisingly mysterious.

Characterized in Caleb Carr's Introduction as "arguably Verne's most important and self-revelatory book," The Mysterious Island tells the increasingly implausible story of five Americans marooned on a deserted Pacific island somewhere in the southern hemisphere, who utilize their scientific knowledge and ingenuity to exploit the opportunity provided by a richly abundant island not only to survive but to prosper, to make their island into a miniature modern industrial society. This would especially appeal perhaps as in some sense almost an allegory about America itself - an almost miraculously abundant wilderness turned into the world's most prosperous society (albeit taking much more time to accomplish this task than Verne's lucky castaways). The reader may assume that Verne (and many of his readers) would have shared a Tocquevillian attitude about America as the modern world's emblematic future.

Less emphasized but immediately obvious to this senior-citizen reader is the evident physical fitness of all the protagonists, who regularly walk endless miles and perform multiple feats of physical labor. None of this is superhuman, of course, but it is a reminder that their multiple accomplishments might well be beyond the capacity of any random collection of five less talented and less sturdy individuals in the real world!

The author summarizes the protagonists' sense of their accomplishments on the first anniversary of their arrival at the island: "They had begun as mere castaways, fighting the elements for their wretched lives, and unsure of their prospects for success! And. now, thanks to their leader's knowledge, they were true colonists, equipped with weapons, tools, and instruments, and they had taken the island's various plants, animals, and minerals - elements from each of nature's three kingdoms - and turned them to their own advantage!"

This plot is complicated, however, by the fact that all is not as it initially seems. The island is, in fact, mysterious. the mystery component contributes a whole other dimension to the story, making it more than just a celebration of science and ingenuity. The author obviously agrees with the colonists' de facto leader that progress is "a good and necessary thing" and that is "a mistake" to believe one could bring back the past." But, in an ending which 21st-century readers might even better appreciate than the original audience, nature wins out; and all the technological ingenuity in the world is ultimately no match for it.

And, for all the castaways' seeming self-sufficiency, that progressive trope is, of course, completely undermined by the presence of the mysterious benefactor, whose own story highlights the abiding relevance of human power politics, science and technology notwithstanding.

Meanwhile, the story takes a novel turn with the discovery of someone else who has been marooned nearby. The experience of finding a man abandoned on a neighboring island for some 12 years and reduced by his isolation to a seemingly sub-human savage state, and then, as it were, coaxing him back to something resembling normalcy, that sub-plot prompts interesting reflection on exactly what it means to be human, on what it means to say that. human beings are social animals - this in the 19th-century heyday of liberal individualism!

Yet that experience itself - namely how the colonists ever even came to be aware of the existence of their new comrade - only further seems to highlight the story's growing sense of mystery. We now know for certain that there must be someone, somewhere, who is also an active character in this story. 

In the end, the mysterious someone does the colonists one final life-saving favor, just in time, as nature triumphs over civilization; and the colonists get to do that characteristic 19th-century thing, they immigrate to America and build themselves a successful and prosperous life together there.