Five Weeks in a Balloon. Jules Verne
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is a missing-person search … The Wonderful Adventures of Mr. Antifer (1894) is a treasure hunt.
As for the first strategy (What’s Going On?), it rarely has to carry the whole narrative. The Underground City (1877) and Robur the Conqueror (1886) start with mysterious phenomena that the novels soon set about explaining. The Castle in Transylvania (1892) takes longer, holding off explanations until the end like your standard-issue whodunit. Even less orthodox is Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas (1870), which nails down the reader’s interest by keeping Nemo, his crew, and their motives shadowy all the way through, prompting me to suggest elsewhere that “these mysteries are the book’s undertow” (Walter, 320).
Five Weeks in a Balloon leaves no loose ends and closes firmly enough, but the novel is also notable for the variety of action and description in its final three-quarters, in the many episodes of the balloon’s actual journey. Verne’s book is episodic, built from individual stories, offering many chances for us to wonder if they’ll make it. Some of these minidramas are one-chapter adventures—the outpost of Kazeh, the towing elephant, the battling cannibals, the ravaging locusts. Lengthier conflicts unfold later on—rescuing a missionary (three chapters), getting trapped in the desert (four chapters), Joe’s disappearance (six chapters), the final sprint to the Senegal River (three chapters). But above them all is that overarching objective of reaching the African west coast.
Other key elements are Verne’s plotting skills and gift of invention, especially his knack for conjuring up tight spots, cliff-hangers, and ingenious escapes—e.g., Joe’s certain doom at the close of chapter 35 … the surprise rescue described in chapter 37 … the “setup” in chapter 34 that makes it all possible. This type of adroitness is often classed as “well-made plotting,” and the term is apt here in the same sense that it applies to the play structures of Victorien Sardou and Henrik Ibsen or the detective novels of Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr: developments and outcomes are cunningly prepared in advance and, even where surprising or shocking, come off as the logical effects of known causes.
Not unexpectedly, Five Weeks ends with a choice display of exactly this kind of virtuosity. Over chapters 38–43 the balloon Victoria keeps losing altitude and seems certain to crash to the earth. Yet each time we think the end is near, Verne finds another way out, reveals another card up his sleeve: they start by dropping all ballast … emptying water tanks … trying this, trying that … on and on through surprise after surprise. It’s one of Verne’s most entertaining traits, here and in the twists, turns, and trick endings of Circling the Moon (1869), Eighty Days, Michael Strogoff (1876), or The Meteor Hunt (1908).
Obviously Five Weeks was ideal for serializing. Its single-chapter adventures would give readers instant gratification, its cliff-hangers would keep them on pins and needles until the next installment. In fact, according to Daniel Compère, “Hetzel had first thought to issue Five Weeks in a Balloon in a periodical specializing in serializations that he’d published since 1860” (37). Ultimately Hetzel released it in an unillustrated softcover edition, but the following year he launched a new periodical in which Verne serializations would be the centerpiece for decades to come. One of history’s first family magazines, it was a twice-monthly publication named the Magasin d’éducation et de récréation. As the title makes clear, it offered a mix of instruction and entertainment, and it grew into one of “the century’s publishing phenomena” (Lottman, 95–6). Verne deserves much of the credit: he furnished Hetzel with a long series of adventure novels that were spiced with humor, hard science, dramatic derring-do, and visionary speculation. Following their serialization, they were republished in illustrated clothbound editions, and over the decades some sixty books appeared in this deluxe format, Hetzel marketing the franchise under the title Voyages extraordinaires … Extraordinary Voyages in literal translation … Amazing Journeys in snappier English.
Standard Ingredients
It may have been due to the saucy scriptwriting that intervened, but Verne’s first novel is thoroughly different in tone from the dark terrors of his early short story “A Journey by Balloon.”
For one thing, his characters are comedy material. Here, as in much of his fiction, they fall into three broad categories: the brain, the antagonist, and the stand-up comic. And these three—juggled, reworked, recombined, often divvied up—will soon became standard ingredients in Verne’s storytelling.
The resident brain is usually a scientist or pedagogue: Dr. Fergusson is a generalist who knows his medicine, history, biological and physical sciences—a walking encyclopedia with countless facts, names, and dates at his fingertips, as he reveals at staggering length in chapters 30 and 38.
The role of antagonist is played by an old pal of Fergusson’s, the rabid big-game hunter Dick Kennedy. In his case it isn’t a full-time job—he opposes Fergusson’s plans only in the first quarter of the book, is outmaneuvered, and after that turns into a well-meaning comrade.
Finally the stand-up comic provides chuckles, chapter taglines, and man-on-the-street perspectives. As is the case here, he’s often a servant: Fergusson’s valet is a pint-sized acrobat named Joe, who talks sense about giant redwoods (“If you live 4,000 years, isn’t it perfectly natural to be on the tall side?”), adds a little social commentary (“If savages had the same tastes as aristocrats, how could we tell ’em apart?”), and even waxes philosophical (“A hunter doesn’t know what hunting really is till he’s the one being hunted!”)
Shrewdly shuffled around, these roles were revived in other novels soon to follow. For instance Journey to the Center of the Earth has its own threesome, except in this case the scientist is the comic figure, his nephew is the skeptical opposition, and the servant is essentially a mute role. Among further variants, two very different scientists supply the brainpower in Twenty Thousand Leagues, while The Mysterious Island (1874) spreads the three roles over a sizable cast complete with understudies (e.g., Pencroff hands off to Joop). In short, there are endless combinations and permutations, and Verne’s stories seem alert to them all. As for the oddity of Kennedy’s short-lived antagonism in Five Weeks, it too reappears: Captain Nicholl badmouths the scheme to go From the Earth to the Moon, then happily signs on in time for blastoff.
Yet, despite its normally lighthearted tone, Verne’s first novel does darken on occasion, although rarely in the vein of “A Journey by Balloon.” Significantly, the most intense of these moments frame the book’s halfway point: Chapter 20 unfolds a stomach-turning combat between two cannibal tribes; then come the events in chapters 21–23, less bloodcurdling but exceptionally somber for Verne as his heroes try to rescue a young missionary. In fact Verne repeatedly grieves the loss of European lives in Africa: Fergusson’s blunt description (chapter 13) of a typical “surface journey” is troubling to read, and even Joe (chapter 35) finds the exploring efforts of Europeans “senseless and even sad.” Still later, when his employer details the blood-spattered history of African exploration (chapter 38), the doctor’s tagline takes the form of a despairing elegy: “This country … has witnessed the noblest kinds of dedication, for which, all too often, death has been the reward.”
At times Fergusson seems to function as Verne’s spokesperson, certainly he’s our handy source for the information and