Candide

Voltaire Candide (1759)
It seemed like time I dipped in a toe, never having actually read anything by the man whilst having lived with his influence for most of my existence. I'm actually listening to a Cabaret Voltaire album as I write this, funnily enough.

I was hoping for wacky proto-science-fiction, which Candide sort of isn't, but never mind. It turns out that I was thinking of Micromégas.

Candide describes the global journey of a young man identified as such, his progress notably incorporating the fictional land of Eldorado, vaguely situated in south America and probably commenting either on Thomas More's Utopia or else its legacy. The novel was a relatively new thing at the time of writing in so much as that it was still doing all sorts of weird things which no-one really seems to bother with these days. Candide is allegorical in the sense of Gulliver's Travels being allegorical - and I'm quite excited by the realisation that Voltaire met Swift whilst living in London - and so our hero's progress serves as a sequence of philosophical metaphors illustrating his ruminations on society, humanity, existence, and how these relate to the religious thought of the day. Specifically it's mostly concerned with whether or not we're living in the best of all possible worlds, as suggested in 1710 by Gottfried Leibniz as a means of accounting for the persistence of evil in a cosmos ruled over by a loving God. Voltaire found plenty of evil upon which to pass comment in 1759, and if he reaches an actual conclusion, I seem to have missed it, so I assume this is more about asking questions, ensuring that certain institutions feel duly uncomfortable, and taking the piss - although not quite to the extent of Swift.

As is probably obvious, I'm somewhat out of my depth here, so any or all of the above may actually be bollocks, but to continue regardless: Candide seems much softer focus than Gulliver, being closer to a ribbing than the weapons grade sarcasm of Swift, excepting infrequent incidents of rape, hanging and related horrors; although it could be that the translation has dulled the narrative's sharper edges. This one was handled by Lowell Bair who did a pretty decent job on Jules Verne as far as I recall, so who knows?

Candide seems fairly light, but was nevertheless a pleasure, and sufficiently so as to justify my keeping an eye open for the aforementioned Micromégas. Where my appreciation may be muted due to having precious little clue about the politics of 1759, the novel still represents a fascinating cameo of eighteenth century attitudes, not least those regarding science and evolution, with the relationship of ape to humanity being something which people were quite clearly thinking about.

The Mysterious Island

Jules Verne The Mysterious Island (1874)
It seems that appreciation of Jules Verne is somewhat reliant upon which translation you happen to be reading, for there are apparently many. I hated Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and everyone in it, so hopefully that was one of the ropey versions. Conversely, I enjoyed From the Earth to the Moon well enough, and have generally found this one to be likewise a decent, if slightly insubstantial read. Both turn out to have been translated by Lowell Bair and for the sake of argument, I'm going to pretend this is entirely the work of Jules Verne - as opposed to Verne given particular emphasis by the aforementioned Bair - because it'll get too complicated otherwise.

The Mysterious Island reads more or less like somebody novelised a few issues of Understanding Science, the sixties kids' magazine building up week by week into etc. etc. First we meet our balloonists, all chaps of good progressive stock, plus a plucky hound and an African-American man included presumably as representative of racial equality and the abolitionist cause against slavery - which is nice although Verne doesn't actually seem to give him much to say, so mostly he's just hanging around following orders and sawing up logs or whatever. Oddly, although this novel continues what I presume must have been Verne's fascination with America as a newborn civilisation doing its best to get things right, we still find some influence of the typically nineteenth century notion of class as an inherent quality; so with the African-American Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged as a roughly equal partner, we're apparently left with a gap which is quickly filled by Jupiter the orang-utan, tamed and rendered a loyal servant at least until Verne gets bored of the idea and he vanishes from sight barring a single reference near the end. I mention this only because it struck me as odd.

Our boys find themselves marooned on the island in what might be read as a re-run of Robinson Crusoe, or perhaps even an inversion. Being enlightened men they immediately throw themselves into the task of civilising the wilderness by means of all their scientific knowledge, smelting iron, making tools, even fashioning glass for their fancy cave, and with no time for Crusoe's philosophising or even much thought beyond their present circumstances. Just like the America from which they came, they're building a new world rather than looking to the horizon in hope of getting back to the old one, so there's a lot of talk about how to make rope, drain lakes, the manufacture of wire for telecommunications and so on; and against all odds, it's actually very readable, even engrossing. This I find of particular interest given the poor reputation of what has come to be regarded as Gernsbackian science-fiction, so named after the editor of Amazing Stories who favoured this kind of technologically-fixated narrative, much to the more recent annoyance of Brian Aldiss; and yet it is only a variation on what Verne wrote.

The Mysterious Island is additionally a sequel of sorts to Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in so much as that it ends with Captain Nemo revealed as the hidden author of certain mysterious occurrences on the island. This conclusion feels a little tagged on given the mysterious occurrences having been mostly underwhelming, but I suppose it keeps the novel from being a couple of hundred pages about the best way to build a boat. There's a possibility that Bair's translation may lose some of the poetry of the original because I otherwise have to wonder why this should be regarded as a classic. This isn't so much a criticism of any failings it may have so much as to acknowledge that it doesn't really do very much as a narrative; but then for something which doesn't do very much, it's nevertheless a highly satisfying read.

From the Earth to the Moon

Jules Verne From the Earth to the Moon (1865)
I was left massively underwhelmed by Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a novel seemingly so dry and plodding as to leave me with the impression of Verne as an overrated institution, particularly when compared to the eminently more readable H.G. Wells with whom he so often shares a sentence. Shortly after forming this impression, it was pointed out to me that I had most likely read a poor translation, so I picked up From the Earth to the Moon to show Verne's disembodied spirit there were no hard feelings, and in hope of a good read. Alarm bells began to ring around the chapter in which one retired colonel type delivers a series of announcements comparing the strength to weight ratio of iron and aluminium, each droning suggestion prefixed by his friend exclaiming hurrah!, which becomes annoying after seventy pages.

Two dud translations in a row, I sneered to myself, rather a coincidence, wouldn't you say?

'Or could it simply be,' I replied out loud for the sake of a faintly amusing image which could later be incorporated into a review, 'that Jules so-called Verne was just a bit shit?'

Apparently not according to Arthur B. Evans whose 2005 essay  Jules Verne's English Translations makes for slightly depressing reading, presenting the possibility that you're actually very lucky to pick up a random Verne translation which hasn't made a complete pig's ear of the original; and my From the Earth to the Moon it turns out, as translated by Lowell Bair, isn't among the good ones. Knowing this actually rendered it a little more readable for me, allowing for some focus on what may have been said in the original rather than the somewhat cak-handed means by which it has been reduced to English. Even knowing as much, this apparently hobbled version does pick up somewhat after the chapter in which a man wearing a top hat says hurrah! over and over, thus unwittingly inspiring another four-thousand trilogies in Worthington P. Bonio's The Penny-Farthing Interface series of generic steampunk landfill moneyspinners; and it was impossible to resist the charm of the following paragraph:

Among the groups of all kinds which assailed him, the "lunatics" were particularly aware of what they owed to the future conqueror of the moon. One day several of these poor people, rather numerous in America, came to him and asked to be allowed to return to their native land with him. Some of them claimed to be able to speak the lunar language and offered to teach it to him. He good-naturedly indulged their innocent mania and agreed to deliver messages to their friends on the moon.

From the Earth to the Moon seems admittedly dry in terms of its story, a clear precursor to the hard science-fiction of Asimov and others, being mostly concerned with the mechanics of building something capable of hurling nineteenth century people into space. The incredible thing is that for the most part, Verne's calculations seem to have been on the mark, right down to Florida as a good place from which to launch such a mission, the practicalities of a renewable air supply, and so on; and even told as a series of conversations about gravity, escape velocity, thrust and the like, once over the potholes, it's still quite readable even given the presumably mangled narrative.

I suspect I've thus far been quite wrong about this author, so next time I'll make certain it's one of the better translations.