A teenager or young adult weaned on a rollicking yarn like “A Journey to the Center of the Earth” may very well seek out another Verne story, but they’d discover an unexpected surprise were they to pick up “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”, which is thrilling and exotic and comfortably within the bounds of science fiction, but also strives for something much deeper and, dare I say it, literary.
This stark difference between the mindless popcorn action of “A Journey” and the darker and brooding reflection of “20,000 Leagues” is anticipated nicely (in my addition, anyway) by a short introductory essay from another author sometimes unfairly pigeonholed: Ray Bradbury. In his preface, Mr. Bradbury describes thematic parallels between “20,000 Leagues” and another novel that has become a monolithic exemplar of American literature and cautionary metaphors: “Moby Dick”. Bradbury lays out a convincing argument for how Nemo (Verne’s cryptic anti-hero) and Ahab are opposite sides of the same coin: Ahab evil in his pursuit to conquer the Great Whale and the sea, Nemo evil in his pursuit to become one with it. Admittedly, Ray Bradbury has always been a shameless starry-eyed dreamer, so it isn't too far-fetched to assume he was reading his Verne novel through rose-colored lenses. But the deeper one gets into Verne’s mysterious undersea saga, the more one realizes how apt a comparison Bradbury has made.
Where "Center of the Earth" was a slick popcorn action story dipped in chocolate fantasy, "20,000 Leagues" is moody and dark and embroidered with real cutting-edge science of its day, along with all its incumbent fears and wonder. Rather than cartwheeling through flashy action-set-pieces, the story of Doctor Arronax and harpooner Ned Land's imprisonment by Nemo is a crawling, cryptic one. It moves very slowly and deliberately, taking its time to offer lavish descriptions not only of the expansive vistas of the world's oceans, but also of the Nautilus, the phantasmagoric undersea palace constructed by Nemo in his self-imposed exile from society. But beyond the prophetic scientific discourse of which Verne is a master, the novel also paints a rich and ambiguous portrait of the Sikh Captain Nemo, whose frustrated views on society are sympathetic but whose strategies on confronting those ills is questionable at best. “20,000 Leagues” is a deeply philosophical novel.
Some of the descriptions of sea life seem quite tedious (okay, 'seem' nothing, they really are tedious). As our narrator, Doctor Arronax, is a marine biologist, we are graced with several encyclopedic descriptions of every possible creature you might find in the sea’s depths. Slowly, however, you begin to realize how much in love with the ocean Arronax is, and all the endless cataloguing of sea-life are really the doctor's love poems to the sea. It is partly through Arronax’s great passion that Nemo at times seems less a villain. How villainous is it exactly to offer an awe-struck marine biologist an opportunity to spend the rest of life studying things no other scientist could even dream existed. The counterweight to the good Doctor’s submission to Nemo’s spell is Ned Land, the restless harpooner who keeps popping his grizzled nose into the room to remind everyone that Nemo is a megalomaniac bastard. Which is basically true, but never in as clear-cut a manner as Land insists. Nemo is far more misguided and dangerous than he is evil.
This moral ambiguity of Nemo, the starry-eyed wonder of Arronax, the sneering and judgmental annoyance of Ned; it all gives the reader a host of points-of-view that play off one another in compelling and complicated ways. Combined with the intricate and luxurious descriptions of the realm under the sea and the speculative but grounded depictions of electric and submersible technology, "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is a vastly different sort of adventure than "A Journey to the Center of the Earth".
It is far more than a schlockly romp around the ocean. It may not be at the same level as "Moby Dick", but it definitely reads as a work of thought-provoking, sometimes haunting literature.
