Jules Verne. Le Tour du Monde en Quatre-Vingts Jours [Around the World in Eighty Days]. 1873; Ebooks Libres et Gratuits, 18 March 2004.

It was time to get back into a little light French reading, so I chose another Jules Verne classic, Around the World in Eighty Days. This book is a lot of fun. Although there are serious moments in the story, the tone is much lighter than 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There is no revenge, a very small amount of science fiction, and there are echoes, perhaps intentional, of some other French classics.

Very simply, the unemotional and very proper Englishman Phileas Fogg bets some members of his club twenty thousand pounds that he can circumnavigate the world in eighty days. This is in 1872. Along with his life savings and a newly hired French servant, Passepartout (literally “goes everywhere”), he begins his adventure. One similarity between this book and 20,000 Leagues is that both Arronax in that novel and Fogg in this one embark with a valet.

This is fun. We get some interesting experiences in the Red Sea after going through the newly constructed Suez Canal. The two men have some real challenges as they take an overland route through India. The railroad ends at a certain point in the interior of the subcontinent, so they end up hiring an elephant. This means even more adventures, including the entry of Mrs. Aouda, a British-educated, aristocratic young widow. As she joins the other two on the adventures, this reader could not help thinking of Haydée, the companion of the Count of the Monte Cristo.

Her story is sort of hard to believe but it makes for some real excitement. They sail from India to Hong Kong to Yokohama with adventures in each place. Passepartout provides some comic relief as he gets connected with a troupe of Japanese acrobats. We can tell that Mrs. Aouda appreciates Fogg, but he is so stereotypically British, stiff upper lip and all that, that we never know much of what he thinks of other people, only how to get around the world to win the bet.

They cross the United States mostly by train from San Francisco to New York. This is just a few years after the Golden Spike. They have problems with attacking Indians, a blizzard, and stampeding bison. We see Fogg going out of his way to help certain people in distress, even though these side adventures steer him away from his goal.

While crossing America, the one perhaps sci-fi element is a land sailboat, or more precisely, a sailsleigh. Clever. The final leg to Liverpool from New York gets desperate as well, but using the last of his savings, Fogg figures a way to get rerouted to try to win his bet.

If there are hints of The Count of Monte Cristo in Around the World in Eighty Days, there is a more direct comparison with Les Miserables. No, there are no revolutions. Fogg is an Englishman, after all. But a London police inspector named Fix is convinced that Fogg obtained his money by robbing a bank. Fix is the Javert of the novel, following Fogg until he can get authorization from London to arrest him. Fogg does not understand his real intention, so he helps him just as he helps others. Fix, though, manages always to rationalize away Fogg’s kindnesses as mere signs of what a “coquin” (all-around bad guy) Fogg really is.

While having a very different tone and very different kind of ending from 20,000 Leagues, the story is entertaining and satisfying in its own way. Readers should have fun with it.

One note. Although I have never seen it, I do recall seeing posters and clips from the 1956 film version of the story. They always include a hot air balloon. There are no hot air balloons in the novel.