Two Fun Classics of Adventure

I recently had surgery on my hand, and while I was recovering I decided to do a little light reading. (My surgery is also why I'm suddenly prolific - I couldn't type for a couple of weeks!) So, I picked up a couple of classic adventure tales: Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. Both are great fun and can be downloaded for free at standardebooks.org.

Around the World in Eighty Days is, in many ways, outdated and obsolete, but that doesn't lessen its charm. In these days of jet airliners, it's a piece of cake to circumnavigate the world in a fraction of eighty days, but in the late 1800s it was an exciting prospect to consider. Railways were expanding into remote parts of the world, and steam-powered ships were faster and more reliable than sailing ones.

The tale begins with the precise and demanding Phineas Fogg betting some friends £20,000 that he can travel around the world in eighty days. They agree to the wager, and he makes plans to leave immediately. Accompanied by his indefatigable valet, Jean Passepartout, he takes the train to Italy, then a steamer to Suez, Egypt. From there, he plans to steam across the Indian Ocean to Bombay, India.

Meanwhile, £20,000 has been stolen from the Bank of England by a brazen thief whose description matches Fogg's. An Inspector Fix is convinced Fogg is the culprit, and he follows him.

Everything is going smoothly until Fogg and Passepartout reach the end of the railroad in India. It is several miles short of what was advertised. Unfazed, Fogg rents a guide with an elephant, and they are back on track. Along the way, they see a funeral procession with a beautiful young woman who is going to be burned on her recently deceased husband's funeral pyre. Fogg and Passepartout rescue her, and she is soon a member of their traveling party.

They encounter many more scrapes and adventures as they reach Yokohama, Japan, San Francisco, New York, and finally London. Inspector Fix manages to get Fogg arrested, which throws him off his schedule, but he ends up triumphant.

The fun in reading Around the World in Eighty Days is how excited Verne is about all the new modes of transportation that are becoming available. He revels in describing all the mechanical details of locomotives and steamships, while getting his hero into all kinds of tight spots. Passepartout is a delightful character who causes all kinds of problems, but always redeems himself when the going gets particularly tough.

After I finished reading Verne's novel, I saw that Michael Todd produced and Michael Anderson directed a film adaptation starring David Niven, Cantinflas, and Shirley MacLaine. It came out in 1956, and it is a really fun film, done in the overblown and epic style of that era. It ended up winning five Academy Awards (back when Academy Award winners were also actually popular movies), including Best Picture. It's very faithful to the novel, and if you enjoy the book, I highly recommend you check out the movie if you haven't already seen it.

The second classic adventure novel I read was H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. I was interested in it because I recently watched the 2003 film, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, which starred Sean Connery as Allan Quartermain. (I like the whole "steampunk" aesthetic, and TLOEG is full of it.)

Allan Quartermain is the main character in King Solomon's Mines, which is about a quest to find those mines and recover a vast treasure of precious gems. It's a classic "Lost World" tale (it might be the first, for all I know) that features an ancient civilization that has been cut off from the modern world.

Quartermain is a safari guide in South Africa who is hired by Sir Henry Curtis to try to find his missing brother. He has a very old map that he thinks his brother was going to use to reach the mines. Quartermain and Curtis are accompanied by Captain John Good, whose monocle and dentures provide some comic relief when they are captured by some savages. Also accompanying the group is a Zulu man, Umbopa, whose regal bearing and physique command respect.

On their quest, they meet with deadly elephants, barely make it across a desert alive, and end up captured by a group of Kukuana warriors, who take them to their ruler, the evil king Twala. Twala's chief advisor is the hideous witch-woman, Gagool, and they rule the Kukuana through terror and random killing of the villagers.

There's a battle to defeat Twala and his sadistic son, and Quartermain and his fellow adventurers manage to force Gagool to take them to the mines. She betrays them and traps them there. Suffice it to say, even when things seem hopeless, the intrepid band manages to make it out alive.

King Solomon's Mines is another very enjoyable read. Both books would be a lot of fun to read aloud to young boys, as they exemplify the importance of loyalty, honor, and courage. I have to admire Haggard's imagination and inventiveness: he spawned an entire subgenre of fantasy/adventure that led to many great tales, up to the present day.

You can download a free version of Around the World in Eighty Days from standardebooks.org here. You can download a free version of King Solomon's Mines here.