Book review: Around the World in Eighty Days

Wiki has an appropriate article; or you can try Goodreads. I dug this out because of our housemove, and partly motivated by having watched the BBC's eight-part adaption with M, which takes great liberties with the story (though it does copy some bits: the train-and-rickety bridge is in, though it is in the States, not Italy, for example; the burning-the-wood-bits-when-the-coal-runs-out, too). Unlike the Beeb's highly sexed-up storyline, in Verne very little happens for most of the book: Our Hero Really does just make most of his train and boat connections, with the excitement being supplied by Fogg remaining calm and unmoved by the tension. At some point this becomes too much even for Verne so he throws in Fix-the-detective to act as an "enemy".

However, the book is problematic, largely because it is flat; dull. And this is largely due to the central character of Fogg being dull. He begins as a totally opaque "high quality" "typical" Englishman and doesn't change much during the book. But Verne's prose is to blame too.

I presume part of the charm of the book of the time was as a travel book; nowadays, of course, all this is known. But the "travel guide" aspect is quite thin too, in part because Fogg himself is so uninterested in everywhere he goes. In other places the flatness of Verne shows through: for example, of a piece of railway line in the States we are told "There were few or no bridges or tunnels on the route". That's the sort of thing you might write of a typical piece of railway, but in this case, we're talking about a specific not a generic piece of railway, and it either has bridges or tunnels, or it hasn't. So Verne is being slack.

Since I'm here, I could make some brief notes about the Beeb version, starring Dr Who. This injects some pizazz into Verne, some of which is welcome: Fogg himself is no longer a blank slate. Some is too anachronistic and woke for my tastes: Passpartout becomes black, and there is a woman along. But worse (a-la Dr Who) is the tedious amounts of emotionalising, and the long-drawn out shots of Our Here's face as some new-but-dull emotion strikes home.