Review: Around the World in Eighty Days

Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like most scifi readers I've seen this everywhere around the place and it's hard not to know anything about a 150 year old story, especially since the title gives up the game. I reckon I've had a copy on my bookshelves for well over a decade now but I've never read the story and I did not read the blurb or any reviews before starting. Presumably I had seen some cartoon or film at least in passing which had given me the mental picture I held, but TV versions of Frankenstein are notoriously bad, so I decided to write down what I thought I knew before starting:

[I think a chap sets off to circumnavigate the globe by hot air balloon on a bet? Or a dare? That's all. I believe he succeeded.]

In fact I wasn't really sure how this was going to make a scifi story, even though I've always considered it so. I do have very specific memories of reading '20,000 Leagues' and 'Journey to the Centre' as a youngster, so it's likely thanks to name association and my own subliminal typecasting that I was expecting a lot more scifi here. How does it scifi? It doesn't much. I mean, the ability to travel so quickly around the Earth by steam powered rail and boat was surely fantastic when the story came out and I can respect that. But I was mostly linking this to scifi by the maths, which is captured neatly by the following quote:

"Now he was an honourable gentleman, mathematically pursuing his eccentric journey around the world."

Phileas Fogg is described as a fastidious, quiet type. A knowledgeable citizen who likes to give charity privately and anonymously. An eccentric surely, but not the type of person you'd expect to undertake such an outlandish and public expedition. Well not at first glance, but I think once we get to know him it seems like exactly the sort of thing this quietly confident bachelor would undertake.

"A true Englishman doesn’t joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager."

During a game of Whist, (which Google explains was a popular card game during the 18th and 19th centuies), Phileas and a few other cads are discussing that the world has either shrunk or grown (depending on your perspective) due to its becoming so much more accessible to us. When the topic reaches the theoretical minimum amount of time that one would require to complete a journey around the world, Phileas decides to prove his point by demonstration and thus the wager is established.

Passepartout (which is a name I would certainly have mispronounced if not for having heard this in audiobook format) is hired by Phileas as a home servant but shortly thereafter finds himself accompanying the rich eccentric gentleman on his 1872 world tour. He's a loyal, good natured, honourable dude even if he is a bit of a basic bitch. He starts off thinking his new master is acting with no intention of completing the journey but quickly falls in love with his master by witnessing Phileas perform heroic deeds with pure and noble intent. *mild eyeroll*

To inject a bit of humour and intrigue the plot has Phileas being followed by a detective who suspects that Phileas is guilty of a recent bank robbery and consequently believes that the whole excursion is simply a way for Phileas to disappear without suspicion. For me, a big fan of the Tintin comics, I loved this dude sneaking around and lurking in the shadows on Phileas' trail. A simple but effective tool that kept the fun coming.

Well, after the quick set up, this is a total mad cap adventure and generally a lot of fun to read - with a few not at all surprising caveats that I'll briefly mention below. I enjoyed the witty banter and the more formal 19th century language.

My geography is crude at best, so I probably didn't appreciate the rich descriptive language employed to paint the variety of landscapes as much as others may have, but it was nonetheless a pleasure to read. The only let down is that it was often paired with terrible generalisations.

Which brings me to the aforementioned caveat. If you pick up a book written in 1872 and are shocked by the 1870s attitudes and the commonplace use of derogatory language therein you are doing yourself a disservice. You can expect to read comments about "the fairer sex" and so, so many very British (mis)interpretations of the cultures visited and if I'm honest it was more frequent and harder to brush off as the story progressed.

I had made been making notes to highlight these but there were a lot and it really serves no purpose to say "look I spotted another one" so I deleted most of the examples after a while. One that I couldn't resist sharing, because it highlights the naivety of these types of stereotypings is that apparently British readers in 1872 needed to be advised that the Chinese and Japanese are actually different people with different cultures. (Sadly I've worked with a few lads who still haven't grasped that much).

There's a section that has a lovely laugh at Mormonism which, while entertaining, seems somewhat out of place in this adventure except that I guess this is an American curiosity which Verne decided to write about and although the Sioux had a much worse treatment in the book, at least white America was not excused from the judgement of the narrative. Personally I felt we spent too long crossing America anyway.

The pages are filled with outlandish humour, for example at one point in the journey Passepartout gets separated from Phileas, joins a cabaret to earn some money and he becomes a part of the base of a human pyramid. During the performance he is then very comically reunited with his master.

The chapter titles were absolutely ridiculous and I loved that. I also liked that chapters were short and plenty, this is something I've always preferred especially back when I was only reading paper books, it helped me keep a steady pace as a slow reader with each next chapter only being, just a little bit more. Not at all conducive to good sleeping habits, but "No Sleep 'Til Death" anyway, right?

The story had me completely fooled and I didn't see the ending coming at all. I was glad to finally experience this undeniable classic.

I listened to the book as read by Mark F. Smith whose voice and reading were very good but the quality of the recording is let down by a subtle but constant high pitched whirring. It didn't ruin it for me at all and it is certainly far from the worst case of a noisy recording on Librivox, but I will say that it was more noticeable with headphones on and may make a difficult reading experience for some listeners.

I had added this to my 2022 reading prompt list, which is mostly made up of scifi subgenres and diversity focused scifi so you might expect that this would be my "classic" scifi pick, but it ain't - that was '2001' for me this year - instead 'Around the World' satisfied the "book being turned into a film or series" prompt, so if you didn't know that that was happening, well, now you do. I don't recall when it was due to release.

A final digression, while seeking out this title I spotted "Around the World in 72 Days" which is a true account of an American woman (Nellie Bly) who set out to beat the fictional Phileas Fogg in 1889. Sounds pretty badass to me so I'm going to check that out next, although this is probably a bad idea for me personally, simply because I'm not so good with biographical texts and as mentioned above my geography is somewhat lacking. No harm in trying though.

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