Rather disappointed by Jules Verne’s Master of the World
(1904), I thought I’d give him another try. After all, Raymond Roussel had been
so zealous about Verne as to forbid people in his presence from even mentioning
the writer’s name lest it be sullied, and Verne’s clever linguistic games – presumably
absent in English translation – had been an influence on the complex linguistic
underpinnings of Roussel’s own narratives. I knew too that older translations
into English of Verne’s works had a poor reputation, so perhaps the fault lay
there. Skeptically, I embarked on his posthumous novel The Golden Volcano
(1906) – its first complete English translation, issued in 2008.
The Golden Volcano helped revive for me - a bit - the
spell I’d once experienced reading Verne. If not exactly a page-turner, the
novel provided a moderately engrossing story of two Montreal cousins who inherit a Klondike
gold mining claim and head west to see what it’s worth. Adventures ensue. Some
of the trudging style from Master of the World persists here: Verne
takes a full third of this 330 page book to describe, again in strictly linear
narrative and encompassing granularity, the trip from Montreal to the mining
claim outside the Klondike capital of Dawson City. A lot of numbers get bandied
about in The Golden Volcano - claims, populations, monetary figures,
geographical coordinates - amounting to a formidable display of research skills.
I particularly liked a lengthy list of prices for commodities and services in
Dawson City, culminating in reference to “an ordinary bath” costing $2.50, but
a Russian bath costing $32.00 (that’s the one I would have wanted). But
this informational accretion also weighs down the narrative, the quest for
inclusiveness sometimes resulting in an awkward, Dan-Brown-style grafting of
factual specifics onto the story. It’s reasonable to assume that Verne provides
such meticulous detail - most of it employed in exposition leading up to his
main story - partly to point out the fragility of human endeavors and the folly
of greed, since all of that effort, as he illustrates at the end of the novel’s
first part, can be wiped out by a sudden, indifferent act of nature.
But it’s clear too that Verne is attempting to transmit an
enduring portrait of the hardship and human hysteria involved in the gold rush.
I had expected adventure in Verne, but not such sweeping historical and social
interest. With an attention to realistic portrayal that calls to mind Theodore
Dreiser and Frank Norris, Verne vividly depicts the difficulties of the trek of
thousands of fortune seekers to the remote gold fields of the Klondike, and the
wretched conditions of the miners’ camps, boom towns, and perilous routes.
While far more laconic than Dreiser (with whose descriptions a reader could
have followed the route without need of map, compass or guide), Verne displays
a similar attention to the downtrodden, most memorably in this instance, the
women and children collapsing along the mountain passes or freezing to death in
the towns and camps, completely unprepared for the ferocious Arctic winter.
The second part of the novel departs significantly from this
naturalistic account. The cousins, possessing a crudely sketched map and a
legend left them by a dying Frenchman (Franco-centrism seems to appear like a
watermark in Verne’s books), head north to the Arctic sea in search of a
legendary volcano of gold, and also into territory much more like the adventurous
Verne that I’d remembered. One of the pleasures of reading Verne, despite his one-foot-in-front-of-the-other
narrative style, lies in the fuzzy zone between realism and fantasy, most
evident here in his cartoonish description of the volcano itself. Golden Mount,
perched at the edge of the Arctic Ocean at the mouth of the MacKenzie river,
rises straight from the tundra, with sides of “at least a 70 degree angle” and
a flat plateau on top from which the travelers can gaze into a caldera “75-80 feet
in circumference” (in other words, a mere 25 feet across), from which smoke
belches and flames flicker. Verne’s understanding of geological processes seems
comical; an earthquake strong enough to change the course of a river is felt an entire mile away, and the functioning
of the volcano seems more akin to a case of nausea than to a geological process
(Verne says as much when a character later compares an eruption to an emetic).
But the conception is too appealing to dismiss - or would be to young readers,
anyway - a volcano that “would throw out the gold-bearing substances, nuggets,
and gold dust along with the lava and slag,” such that one could “simply gather
them up.” Nifty. Verne seems to have understood what Hollywood special effects
makers, decades later, would know so well: that verisimilitude is entirely dispensable
if one can manage to induce a willing suspension of disbelief.
The characters in The Golden Volcano have limited
psychological complexity, but the situations in which they find themselves
provide enough mystery, suspense and rich historical detail to maintain a
modicum of interest, and enough amusing creative touches (“Stop” – what a
perfect name for a dog) to elicit a few smiles. If revisiting Verne may have
been disappointing overall, I could nonetheless appreciate that I might well
have loved these books - The Golden Volcano in particular - if I’d read
them at the right age. That age gap intrigues me; after all, other books from
childhood - Treasure Island, Captain Blood, Tove Jansson’s Moomin
books – have held up well under rereading. Jules Verne’s magic, however, seemed
to me relatively diminished. Maybe I’ve become relatively diminished. In any
case, I found enough engagement on this second attempt to eventually try one of
Verne’s works in the original French. After all, there’s an entire bookshop in Paris devoted to him, and perhaps those French readers, even those lacking Raymond
Roussel’s fanaticism, are accessing something I am not.
