The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  Dufrénoy was stunned, although in truth he had not expected any other response. It was, after all, his one hundred and fifteenth rejection by a publisher, and by now he was becoming/

  pp. 17–18

  /his twelve-year-old grandson Michael had come to visit, transported for the weekend from his home on the Kent marshes where he lived in one of the towns magnetically suspended above the floodplain, the “hovervilles” as they were known. Michael was a reluctant guest at his grandfather’s since the apartment was mean and dingy and situated near the base of a seventy-storey dwelling complex in run-down Muswell Hill. Little sunlight penetrated down through the urban canyons to the lower-level abodes, hence illumination down there had to be provided by sulphur-gas streetlamps which burned throughout the day as well as the night, shedding an unsteady bronze glow and a Hadean odour. Michael was accustomed to skies that reached from horizon to horizon and air that was constantly freshened by sea-borne breezes. The city, and especially his grandfather’s part of it, was to him a fusty, almost subterranean place, and his infrequent visits were conducted out of a sense of duty and with a greater than usual pre-adolescent surliness which even Dufrénoy’s most strenuous efforts at inculcating jollity could never dispel.

  For the most part the boy sat and watched entertainments on Dufrénoy’s videophote set, a particular favourite of his being a song-competition presentation in which contestants with little or no musical talent vied to deliver the blandest possible rendition of some popular standard, their goal being to cause the least trouble to the ear of the listener and thus gain greater approbation than their rivals. Another of Michael’s preferred pastimes was a battery-powered toy, the Game Wallet, manufactured by the Worthington Novelty Company of Newcastle. This bauble consisted of a steel box with an inset window in which, by means of an ingenious development of Brownian motion, tens of thousands of phosphorescent vapour particles were manipulated electrostatically to form images. The images, controlled by magnetic cards purchased separately, presented the player with various games and puzzles to be solved, from relatively straightforward old standbys such as Hangman and Noughts and Crosses to more abstruse fare such as Moon Cannon Target Practice and Transglobal Travel Time Challenge.

  Dufrénoy would look on with something close to despair as his grandson played with his Game Wallet often for hours at a stretch, mesmerised by the fizzing luminous patterns, thumbs manipulating the box’s brass control keys with blurring dextrous speed. How alien the boy seemed to him, a creature not merely from a different generation but from a different planet as it were! What did Michael know of books? Of literature, of culture? Very little, it appeared. Such things were not required learning at school any more, where the subjects of science and economics were pushed to the fore, to the detriment of all others. It pained Dufrénoy to think that all the/

  pp. 49–50

  /and from there the protest march wound southward along Whitehall toward the gates of Downing Street, where it halted and the protestors set up a chant, brandishing placards and stamping their feet. They called for the Prime Minister to emerge from his residence, which eventually he did, capitulating to their demands with a bleary, sheepish grin on his face. Dufrénoy could scarcely believe it. He didn’t know which was more astounding: that the Prime Minister had the nerve to face members of the electorate after the heinous crimes he had committed, or that the protestors were not baying for the man’s blood but rather objecting to his decision, announced earlier in the day, that he intended to resign. He had said that morning at a press conference that he considered his position untenable in the light of the revelation that he had slaughtered his wife and children in cold blood (as proved by the fact that several eyewitnesses had come forward to testify that they had personally seen him standing over the bodies, knife in hand, bathed in gore). Moreover, the Prime Minister had said, it did not behoove the nation’s representative on the world stage to be a convicted rapist and the recipient of several sizeable bribes from corporations involved in shady dealings, as revealed in an exposé in one of the newspapers yesterday. Indeed, anyone who, like him, appeared in covertly-taken photographs, some of which showed him cavorting with prostitutes of both sexes and others of which depicted him belabouring a member of His Majesty’s Opposition with a crowbar in a backroom at the House of Commons, was not the slightest bit deserving of high office.

  The people, however, ardently felt otherwise. For the Prime Minister was nothing if not a man of immense charm and charisma, whose face, not least when viewed via videophone transmission, had a convincingly handsome and self-assured demeanour to it, indeed a kind of saintliness which endeared it to any who set eyes on it; not to mention his voice, which exuded a desire to be trusted and which worked on the machinery of the soul in much the same way that a mechanic could work on the engine of an antigravity aircraft, finding its faults and fine-tuning them out of existence.

  And so there was great joy among the crowd of protestors when he came out from Number 10 to address them, and even greater joy when the content of his speech was a solemn statement to the effect that he had, after consultation with his Cabinet and much soul-searching, decided to recant on his previous decision and not resign after all. The joy turned to delirium when he added that he was going to postpone the General Election which was due next year, pushing it back to the year 2011, in order to allow greater time for his policies to take effect.

  Dufrénoy strode away in disgust, remembering the time back in 1968 when he was still a resident of Paris and there had been unrest among Parisian students for a similar reason, namely that both the President and the Prime Minister had tried to resign after an adultery scandal that saw them having an extramarital affair, not in itself unusual among French politicians, but with each other? While the old-guard establishment was demanding the two men’s heads on a plate, the radical youth of Paris urged the exact opposite, and thus was sparked off the practice, now widespread across the world, of politicians attempting to outdo one another in the egregiousness of their misbehaviour while still maintaining the goodwill of the electorate. It was for that reason that Dufrénoy had emigrated from France, thinking that surely among the sober, staid British such temptations to flout the public trust would be at the very least resisted, if not/

  pp. 84–85

  /and hard as he tried, Dufrénoy could not halt them from entering his apartment. There were ten of them pressing against the door, and he was but one elderly man.

  “Good morning, sir,” said the leader of the advertising troupe, proffering his card, which read Albion Home Improvement Supplies Ltd. “We shan’t take up much of your precious time, I promise.” As he spoke, the other members of the troupe were rapidly setting up scenery, unfurling backdrops from suitcases and pinning them to screw-together steel frames, and pumping air into inflatable rubber props such as furniture and plants. In very short order they had created a kind of impromptu stage in Dufrénoy’s living room, and divesting themselves of their overalls, to reveal costumes underneath, they began to act.

  Dufrénoy had little alternative but to sit and watch as the advertising troupe ran through a series of playlets, each outlining a domestic scenario which might require the remedial application of some product or other available from Albion Home Improvement Supplies Ltd. , for instance the installation of an extra layer of glazing in bedroom windows to prevent infants dying of hypothermia during a savage cold snap akin to the one that gripped France for three years in the 1960s, or the introduction of new kitchen apparatus to appease an irked wife who was struggling to cook meals on outmoded and antiquated oven equipment. That the widower Dufrénoy obviously lived by himself and was patently too old to have infant children was of no consequence to the troupe, who had a job to do and did it regardless of the status or circumstances of the person into whose home they had barged their way. It must be added that their performance was somewhat perfunctory and listless as a result of their having to deliver it, on average, twenty times a day, five days a w
eek. It had gathered, one might say, rust and a certain unevenness of function, as will any device used repetitively, constantly, and without thought. Dufrénoy himself remained unmoved by the actors’ efforts, apart from a small tear of bored frustration that crept from his eye toward the end. He would rather the gigantic billboards that covered the side of many a tower block and dwelling complex, the videophone commercials with their endless jabbering singsong refrains, the troubadours on the pneumotube who strummed their guitars to commuters and extolled the virtues of a particular brand of dentifrice or “gentleman’s invigoration pill” – anything to this thespian intrusion into his apartment, this invasion of his living space and his psychic space as well, that invaluable free area of the mind into which daily the wormy efforts of the advertisers were making deeper inroads/

  pp. 120–121

  /lamenting that he barely had time to compose poetry any more. He was of pensionable age but, having worked sporadically and to little profit during his lifetime, he found himself with scant funds to retire on, and so was obliged to eke a living by whatever means he could. Currently this entailed a kind of literary piecework, Dufrénoy employing his skills with pen and paper to furnish the less verbally gifted with articulacy. In other words he was a ghost-writer, not of fiction nor even of non-fiction but of letters, curricula vitae, job applications and other such mundane communications. The working man and woman had little need of or love for literacy and the written word, but in some areas of life a better-than-basic grasp of language was still desirable, and that was where Dufrénoy came in. The irony of him, an expatriate Frenchman, being more fluent and accomplished in the tongue of Shakespeare than most Englishmen, was not lost on him.

  It was not lucrative work, since there were many others like him who offered the same service. Payment was low and grudgingly given because people understood that this was something they ought to be able to do for themselves, and hence furtively resented having to hire someone else to do it on their behalf. Dufrénoy earned pennies at a time and yet counted himself grateful. But each hour that he spent drafting a note of complaint or a bank loan request for some unlettered stranger was an hour he did not spend marshalling words into sonnet-form or iambic pentameter, rime riche or blank verse, painting emotion with the colours of the alphabet, expressing the agony and loneliness of his life with all the syntactical precision and sensory honesty he could muster, searching for new and different modes of/

  pp. 137–138

  /came to him, like the shock of being doused with ice water, that instead of the father regarding the son as a disappointment, as was commonly the case, here the roles were reversed and the son was of the view that everything his father had ever been or done was a source of shame.

  For Jerome was now as unlike Dufrénoy as it was possible to be. It wasn’t merely that his name was accentlessly anglicised, for that was expectable and acceptable; the lack of acute and circumflex, though, was symptomatic of much else. Jerome was without distinguishing mark, nothing stood out on him, he had been planed and smoothed to fit in with twenty-first century British life, he was reduced, whittled, ordinary. He worked at a bank in the City, as Dufrénoy himself had once been a bank clerk (before that terrible, embarrassing incident when he spilled ink on The Big Book). But where Dufrénoy père had found bank work hard and dispiriting, Dufrénoy fils adored it. He boarded the gun-fired Bullet Train at Romney station each morning with the eager, carefree air of a man going on a jaunt to the seaside, and chortled as the explosive detonation set the train hurtling along its track on frictionless runners with near-concussing force. The ten-minute journey to Liverpool Street was, for Jerome, an opportunity to prepare for the tasks of the day ahead. He would get his brain churning with some mental arithmetic, adding five-figure numbers together and making compound-interest calculations, so that, like an athlete arriving at the starting blocks, he would be warmed up and ready for the nine-till-five race that awaited him when he reached his workplace.

  Jerome, nearly forty, was prospering and well on course for a junior partnership by forty-five and a senior partnership by fifty. His life was following a perfect arc of development, almost as if it had been designed that way by a totalizer. He had a pretty wife and two lively children, and all of them loved him unquestioningly. Given his upbringing, and especially the temperamental instability of his father, it was nothing short of a miracle that he had turned out so totemically normal.

  “Then again,” Dufrénoy mused with some chagrin, “it is always the case that we turn and become that which our parents are not.” Jerome’s rebellion against his paternal exemplar had seen him throwing himself wholeheartedly into the embrace of conformity, and in/

  pp. 169–171

  /heatwave held sway for the next five years. The streets sweltered and piles of urban dust silted up in the gutters like grey-black snowdrifts. The Thames dried up and its cracked-mud bed became a venue for sunbathers and intrepid promenaders. After a while a new sport developed, whereby the winds that sometimes howled inland along the dead river’s course were put to use propelling wheeled yachts. Landlubber seamen would hoist sail and hurtle at speeds of anything up to fifty knots along the desert-like channel, veering between the pilings of the many bridges. Meanwhile the sun glared down on London like an eye that would not close. Even at night-time there was a memory of its blaze in the still-parched air and the perturbingly bright moon. Some people said the world was coming to an end, which would have seemed feasible but for the fact that elsewhere on the planet weather patterns remained normal. It was Britain alone that was affected by the heatwave.

  There was, naturally and inevitably, a slow exodus to other countries that in time became a stampede. Once a few rats were seen to abandon the sinking ship, all the rats wanted to leave. The crops were failing, year after year, and the price of imported food rose steeply as other nations took advantage of Britain’s desperate straits and imposed swingeing tariffs. In the dwelling complexes like the one Dufrénoy lived in, people started dying. Starvation was the principal cause of death but the heat took many victims as well – the very young, the very old, the already sick, those in general too weak to cope. The sight of corpses piled on street corners, rotting in the heat, became so commonplace that even from the faintest-hearted it failed to elicit so much as a wince. Rats proliferated, bringing disease and, worse, the threat of attack, for in their hordes the rodents became bold and would band together and pick off those solitary individuals, usually tramps and children, who seemed most defenceless and least threatening. London’s famous pigeons likewise turned feral, until soon Trafalgar Square and various other landmarks were no-go zones for the capital’s citizenry. The verminous grey birds would swoop without warning, whole flocks of them pouncing on human prey and pecking and scratching their victims to death, whereupon the pigeons would feast lustily and greedily on their kill. It was a time when the natural order of things was well and truly out of kilter. The balance of existence was wrong.

  Dufrénoy survived largely by virtue of the fact that he was inured to deprivation and suffering, indeed this had been a characteristic of his life almost since birth, and even in old age he was hardy and phlegmatic, a veteran of countless campaigns against vicissitude. Jerome had taken off to France with his family, neglecting to invite his father to join them in exile, but Dufrénoy did not hold this against him. All too clearly, all too painfully, he understood his son’s choice, and he respected it.

  There was no let-up during those years of Britain’s tribulation, until finally, like a ghost from forgotten times, the rain came. The sound of its pattering was so unfamiliar that for a while people did not comprehend what this noise portended, this gentle hissing from the sky, the soft wet plashing of droplet after droplet upon baked stone surfaces and dust-velveted roads. Nor did they truly fathom why the sunlight had faded. They had forgotten what clouds were. They thought this dimming of the day an unnaturally premature twilight. Some fancied that it was, at last, The End.

 
; It was certainly the end of the drought. Down came the rain, and thunder grumbled distantly in low/

  pp. 203–205

  /and I shall be a living poem,” said Dufrénoy to himself, “a testament to all that London is and has been.”

  Who is to say that his insanity was not, in truth, the clearest-eyed sanity conceivable? Certainly, as he clambered up the face of the billboard, Dufrénoy had never experienced such a sense of pure, exhilarating omniscience. The higher he rose, the more apparent the patterns of existence became to him. The city was lines, London a vast page upon which forty million individuals wrote their life-poems, in their hearts, inside their heads, almost without being conscious of it. Bombarded from all sides by noise and demands on their time and their pockets, by advertisements perpetually clamouring for their attention and the relentless pressure to spend and buy and possess, by the panoply of capitalism arrayed in all its chrome and gilt splendour, by messages of want that undermined their self-confidence and made them feel incomplete, still they resisted, fighting a rearguard action in the depths of their souls as they struggled to cling on to that last vital, intact part of themselves that the moneymen and the corrupt bureaucrats and the avaricious plutocrats so badly wished to reach and conquer. You would not know it unless you looked deep and hard into their eyes. Even in the dullest of gazes, the deadest of expressions, you might find it. The Great Heat had tempered people, tested their mettle and forced them to rediscover an inner flame which had almost, almost gone out. In Dufrénoy the flame had continued to burn more or less constantly, although it had many a time guttered and nearly failed, for example back at Père-Lachaise cemetery, beside de Musset’s tomb. But it flared nonetheless, unquenchably, and now he understood that he was not alone; and he was not a poet. He was poetry. Everyone was poetry.