Five Weeks in a Balloon; or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen by Jules Verne
Translated by "William Lackland"
345 pages
Published 1863; unauthorized translation published 1869
Read from January 9 to January 15
Rating: ★½ out of 5
Jules Verne was one of my first loves as a reader. I cut my teeth on abridged versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and quickly graduated to the full versions of those classics as well as From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island. One of the very first pieces of creative writing I ever produced was a fan-fiction "sidequel" of sorts to 20,000 Leagues, which I wrote when I was 8 or 9. In my tween and teen years I grew into a Wells partisan -- The War of the Worlds was the first unabridged "adult" novel I ever read, and I vastly preferred the vivid and exciting The First Men in the Moon to Verne's more aloof selenographic explorations -- but Center of the Earth had plesiosaurs, damn it, and Captain Nemo remains one of science fiction's most enduring and fascinating antiheroes.
By some form of cultural osmosis, a vague idea of Five Weeks in a Balloon seems to permeate many people's ideas of the rest of Verne's bibliography. My brother, when I first read Around the World in Eighty Days, said something to the effect of "Didn't they [the characters] go the whole way in a balloon?" (Or maybe he thought it was something that had actually happened. Randy sometimes had trouble telling fiction apart from history in those days.) Yet I've never read Balloon. It is perhaps the most recognizable omission from my Verne reading list (how much of the general public today, after all, has heard of Robur the Conqueror, the Verne book I'm most excited to read?). I felt more obligation than anticipation about reading it now. I checked it out way back in November and kept putting it off until now. At the very worst, I figured this would be a virulently racist but quaintly entertaining old-timey adventure. It is indeed virulently, horribly racist (in keeping with basically all popular fiction of the period), but I was wrong about the entertaining part. Five Weeks in a Balloon is, in a word, boring.
There is one evocative, Romantic scene, in which the Victoria glides gracefully over a "green, almost transparent sea" of grass: "The anchors plunged into this lake of flowers, and traced a furrow that closed behind them, like the wake of a ship." That image is powerful, lovely, and perhaps the only mark in the book's favor. The characters are dull, barely defined types that would recur in Verne's later work: Joe, the goofy, acrobatic, devoted servant, is a discount store version of Passepartout, whom (in memory, at least) is more vividly realized and individual; Dr. Ferguson is a stock competent captain type grafted onto the "genius scientist" role; Dick Kennedy is the merest outline of the Great White Sportsman type. I kept expecting the book to gain momentum once the voyage proper began, a hope which kept me reading long after I should have abandoned it, but aside from the sea of grass scene, which lasts scarcely a page, reading remained an unrewarding trudge through horrible Victorian conceits and race theory. Genre parody though it may be, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad is a vastly more satisfying balloon adventure across Africa.
Perhaps the fault lies with the translator, a pseudonymous and wholly unauthorized pirate distributor none too careful about expressing Verne's exact meaning, and certainly heedless of placing pages in the correct order. In this reprint of the 1869 "William Lackland" edition, the first page of chapter thirteen is missing entirely, substituted with the first page of chapter thirty, which in turn is absent in its proper place, replaced by a random page from chapter forty-three. There's no telling how many careless word mixups there are throughout the text; I certainly doubt the eastern coast of Africa was ever buffered by "mango" swamps.
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