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Rating: Second stop on my journey of revisiting the so-called Extraordinary Voyages by Jules Verne, the Journey to the Center of the Earth positions itself chronologically right at the beginning of this “collection” of novels.
He was 35 years old when he wrote it, and - I'm sorry - I don't see at all a correspondence between enthusiasm and result.
It is the journey of the three protagonists - the grandfather Professor, an eminent academic, the nephew Axel, who is the narrator, and the imperturbable Icelandic guide Hans, to whom all our sympathies must go - among the three.
Disregarding, as it is appropriate, the inconsistency of the journey with respect to a hundred or so laws of physics, the plot is nonetheless insubstantial.
Two-thirds of the novel are didactic dissertations on geology, mineralogy, zoology, paleontology, devoid of any interest even for the reader who - like me - has a scientific background.
Until the novel shifts gear (at two-thirds, precisely), the journey essentially remains a long list of minerals, not aimed at making known or disseminating anything, but rather to allow a didactic enumeration of names devoid of any purpose in the context.
Verne tries to keep attention high through heightened and alarmed tones, unfortunately resulting in getting us used to a state of "declared continuous danger."
Even the preparation of the journey, which could perhaps have provided some interesting ideas, fizzles out in ventures of dubious interest (such as the unnecessarily detailed encrypted message) that add nothing to the value of the work.
Then at a certain point, Verne decides the descriptive part is over and places our three heroes in a whirlpool of events whose drama he tries to convince us of.
Unfortunately, having already become accustomed over a hundred pages to sequential dramas, this alleged dramatization ends up being comical in the end.
At a certain point, one wishes that finally one of the various cataclysms (explosions, water scarcity, food shortage, volcanic eruptions, prehistoric monsters, getting lost in the darkest darkness) would finally put an end to the group's torments.
Only you realize there are still 50 pages to go, and you understand it won't be so.
If, like me, you have in mind Levin's 1959 film, a successful film nominated for three Oscars, well forget it.
It maintains the central idea intact but — considering the extremely dull development of the novel — makes a number of fundamental and fortunate changes, managing to provide a level of interest it achieves thanks to these changes that the novel cannot aspire to in any way.
I won’t speak of the recent versions, as I have completely ignored them.
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