The Mysterious Island – Jules Verne, 1874 ★½

What a Setting, Shame about the Plot

Do you like novels where character development, subjective perspectives, and multi-layered narratives are replaced by detailed explanations about how metallurgy and explosives work?

Do you want a main protagonist who doubles as a pontificator on the meaning of life, liberty, and everything else?

Do you enjoy big reveals featuring inexplicable interventions by characters from other novels that shut down storylines just as they begin to get exciting?

Jules Verne was a celebrated literary pioneer whose fantastic visions still enchant readers, but what grabs you about this legendary example of his prodigious output is a total stiffness in characters and plot.

The Mysterious Island introduces us to Lincoln Island, an uncharted isle just beyond the mapped regions of the far Pacific. During the U. S. Civil War, five Union soldiers trapped in Richmond, Virginia hop onto a balloon abandoned in the middle of a hurricane. It carries them to this faraway place they name after their president.

Verne writes: “It would have been difficult to unite five men, better fitted to struggle against fate, more certain to triumph over it.”

A depiction of Lincoln Island, from Verne's description. Initially taken for a tiny islet when the party make landfall at a narrow extremity, Lincoln Island eventually takes on the character of a tiny continent, with very different ecologies across its terrain.
Image from https://study.com/cimages/multimages/16/449px-lincoln_island_svg_file.svg5009276691239250756.png

Struggle and triumph are what come to define them:

“If you like, captain, we will make a little America of this island! We will build towns, we will establish railways, start telegraphs, and one fine day, when it is quite changed, quite put in order and quite civilized, we will go and offer it to the government of the Union. Only I ask one thing.”

“What is that?” said the reporter.

“It is, that we do not consider ourselves castaways, but colonists, who have come here to settle.”

What follows is less a survival tale than a prose layout of how to construct your own working colony using a couple of watches, a match, a dog collar, and a single kernel of corn. Verne works hard to sell his concepts; his protagonist, an engineer named Cyrus Harding, seems able to recite every volume of Popular Mechanics from memory.

A cache of provisions are found by Harding and his men at an opportune moment in The Mysterious Island. It is just one of the strokes of good luck that suggest a benevolent power watches over them.
Illustration by N. C. Wyeth from https://www.amazon.com/Mysterious-Island-illustrated-Jules-Verne-ebook/dp/B0976TKDD2

He is presented as a towering visionary able to see the future:

“As long as the earth is inhabited it will supply the wants of its inhabitants, and there will be no want of either light or heat as long as the productions of the vegetable, mineral or animal kingdoms do not fail us. I believe, then, that when the deposits of coal are exhausted we shall heat and warm ourselves with water. Water will be the coal of the future.”

A problem with The Mysterious Island can be summed up by its initials: Too Much Information. The more it goes on, the more it is weighed down by explanations too vast and labyrinthine to be comprehensible, let alone swallowed whole; often delivered though long passages of dialogue too ornate to be credible. People talk as if they are delivering college dissertations, not conversing.

Then there is the problem of action, or lack of it.

A long section at the beginning of the book, chapters 2-8, are spent with the castaways wander across the island trying to find Harding, who disappeared along with his dog during the balloon landing. Since you know he’s too important to lose so fast, this becomes tedious. Then, after Harding and Top are found, you get chapter after chapter of them building their amazingly well-outfitted society, meeting every need.

Top the dog encounters a snake, one of a handful of dangerous encounters in the book. Harding and his party look on. The illustration by Jules Férat is from the original 1874 French edition. Image from https://www.julesverne.ca/vernebooks/jules-verne_mysterious-island.html

“Before all masters,” explains the narrator, “necessity is the one most listened to, and who teaches the best.”

Verne often warns the reader wild animals are about, but little in the way of danger actually confronts the party for well over forty chapters. They just go about planting, building, inventing explosives, building firearms, and creating their own habitation complete with a hydraulic-powered elevator. They even set up their own cross-island telegraph.

The five men get along quite well. Too well. No arguments. All external challenges are conquered with effort and grit. A handful of seemingly deadly reversals are each in turn reversed again by what Harding begins to regard as an invisible benefactor:

Yes! they had to acknowledge it, a mystery existed! An inexplicable influence, evidently favorable to the colonists, but very irritating to their curiosity, was executed always in the nick of time on Lincoln Island. Could there be some being hidden in its profoundest recesses? It was necessary at any cost to ascertain this.

Whatever the nature of this influence, its tendency to appear whenever Harding and his crew are in some mess they can’t extract themselves from puts paid to any chance of real suspense.

In 1961 Hollywood released a movie version of The Mysterious Island, neither the first nor the last. This one was considerably jazzed up by the appearance of a giant crustacean (courtesy of special effects genius Ray Harryhausen) and a couple of beautiful women. In the book, it's all men, all the time.
Image from https://houseofgeekery.com/2020/07/03/retro-review-mysterious-island/ 

There are two places where The Mysterious Island rises above the tedium and threatens to become a first-rate adventure novel. One is at the very beginning, a harrowing chapter where the characters are introduced as abstract, unnamed entities clinging to their runaway balloon, facing certain death until the island looms into view. It pulls you into the book and keeps you riveted through to the sudden landing.

The other comes at the start of the third and final section, where Lincoln Island is visited by pirates. A running battle commences. Verne handles this part with verve and dispatch, putting his characters in harm’s way for an extended period and allowing the reader to imagine how such a vast place as Lincoln Island could be properly defended:

Now, alas! their island no longer belonged to them entirely; others had taken possession of it, miscreants polluted its shores, and they must be destroyed to the last man.

Alas, after building up a good head of steam, this section gets short-circuited by the Invisible Benefactor, who steps in to lend a hand just before the final battle. Harding seems at times to suggest this offstage ally may actually be God Himself. Has the novel been taken over by a literal deus ex machina?

Sort of. To say more would be a spoiler, if spoiling such a stupid left-field ending as you wind up getting here is possible. As annoyed as I was throughout the book by its turgid pace, nothing prepared me for the sudden pointlessness of its ending.

Jules Verne was in his mid-40s when he published The Mysterious Island, in the midst of a long and prodigious career. The Voyages extraordinaries series he produced would comprise well over 60 novels, and include Mysterious Island as well as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and Around The World In Eighty Days.
Image from https://www.nme.com/news/film/nicolas-cage-says-he-would-like-to-play-jules-vernes-captain-nemo-3202003

There are other positive things worth noting about The Mysterious Island. Verne’s natural descriptions are vivid and engaging enough in lieu of story. He describes storms with harrowing zeal. Otherwise, most of the nature writing has the settlers killing assorted wildlife for food and pleasure, which grows monotonous however you feel about such things personally.

You do get a wonderful feeling for Lincoln Island itself. Verne makes it into a pastoral paradise, alternately frosty and tropical, with a myriad of wildlife introduced from all parts of the known world. The book takes you from a thin coastal strip where the balloon crash lands to vast forests and cave networks. Every section of the island seems to have its own unique features and identity:

What a contrast between the northern and southern part of the coast! In proportion as one was woody and fertile so was the other rugged and barren! It might have been designated as one of those iron coasts, as they are called in some countries, and its wild confusion appeared to indicate that a sudden crystallization had been produced in the yet liquid basalt of some distant geological sea.

The human characters, on the other hand, are uniformly dull. Harding is presented as so faultless that you come to realize anything he says is bound to turn out true. His responses to his fellows are often elliptical, especially concerning the mystery of the benefactor.

The Mysterious Island influenced a lot of adventure stories that followed, as well as the 1993 computer game Myst, where players try to make sense of a deserted island they find themselves stranded on. Like in the novel, characters must figure out how to make the most of the few objects they find.
Image from https://dni.fandom.com/wiki/Myst_Island 

Of the others, one is a hothead who barks at everyone but Harding and whose abrasive manner is suggestive of a least-favorite work colleague. Another is a freed slave whose defining trait is to cringingly insist on calling Harding “master.” They all bow and scrape to Harding, but you don’t mind it so much when it’s just the white guys doing it.

Also along for the ride are a reporter and a young boy, neither of whom generate enough interest to make them memorable even while they occupy nearly every page of a 500-page book. They just add their own muscle to the overall endeavor.

“In fact, they were energetic; an energetic man will succeed where an indolent one would vegetate and inevitably perish,” Verne writes.

Eventually a sixth person is found, too, who comes with an elaborate backstory that connects this novel with another Verne had written before. This becomes an annoying habit on The Mysterious Island of Verne revisiting his past literary glories.

It’s unfair to criticize Verne himself too much for what I read; an 1874 translation by Agnes Kinloch Kingston published in paperback by Signet Classic. Apparently Verne’s early English translators introduced much of its stodgy prose; in his native French he was known to be more fluid and original. If you are interested in giving The Mysterious Island a better chance than I did, try to find one with a modern translator, or perhaps even read it in the original French if you can. Bon chance!