by Mike Ashley
“I’ll write your article,” he said, joining the old men in the car. “What’s the angle?”
“Jules Verne himself wrote not only to spread the wonder of scientific knowledge but also to raise awareness of its dangers,” the Island said, through Verne the Hand. “Not that knowledge was dangerous, but that misapplication of it would always have serious consequences, both for the person who applied it and for the world. He lived at the beginning of the age when humans were to get their hands on the greatest powers and the greatest wealth. Many evils we might consider footnotes in history were current at the time – slavery among them. I propose that you consider presenting our information in the light of this perspective: to treat properly with any alien world we must strive to understand ourselves and the way that we create our own, and that to ensure our survival we must apply ourselves closely to the study of threats that lie both without and within.”
“Doesn’t sound like the kind of stuff that grabs the headlines,” Riba said.
“The headlines are up to you,” Verne said as the car took them through the jungle back towards the house. The moon was out and the skies clear. Tupac shone like a star close to its side from her place in orbit. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”
Riba was already planning his full-virtual Time magazine spread of The Adventurers’ League, never mind his brief half-life in the global newsnets when it came to setting out the full story of Isol’s trip and what she’d found. For good magazine sales you need a stable, literate population who want to talk. Wars were always good for that, but he could live with the peace, he thought, as he followed Verne up the steps and into the Club. He could live with the idea of noble adventurers on a secret island, eternally afloat, watching out for everyone.
“Hey, do I get membership here?”
“That depends on what you write, Mr Riba. It all depends . . .”
HECTOR SERVADAC, FILS
Adam Roberts
With The Mysterious Island we see the end of an especially productive period of Verne’s writing. Few of his next sequence of novels would capture the imagination in the same way as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in Eighty Days. Verne seems almost to have lost his faith in mankind. Unlike his castaways in The Mysterious Island, who use their ingenuity to survive, the survivors on an open raft in Le Chancelor (1874/5) resort almost to cannibalism and murder before they are saved. Michael Strogoff (1876), about the war between Russia and the Tartars and envisaging a Tartar invasion of Siberia, was popular in France and remains well known if little read today.
With his next novel, Verne’s growing misanthropy turned upon science. Until now all of Verne’s scientific novels had been assiduously researched to ensure painstaking accuracy. Hector Servadac (1877), on the other hand, is clearly a fantasy. The Earth is struck by a comet and a chunk of it, including parts of Gibraltar and North Africa, are carried away into space complete with its occupants. The scientific consequences of such a collision are ignored, and the attempt to return to the Earth by balloon is equally preposterous. At the end it is suggested that the whole episode is a dream. In fact the book, which also contains some of Verne’s most racist views, has to be read in the same vein as Dr Ox’s Experiment, and that is as a satire upon isolationism and prejudice. It is a book that tells us far more about Verne himself and his views of the world than almost any of his other works.
The strange dreamlike quality of the novel has been captured wonderfully in the following story which looks deeper into the nature of reality.
1
Hector flew in. It’s OK, he caught breakfast on the plane. He doesn’t need anything to eat, he’s good. But there was a wait at the hire car desk, and the wait brought speckles of sweat to his face and torso. His flesh, having been starved of Californian sunshine, and having been seduced by French food for a year, had assumed the colour and consistency of mozzarella. He tried this line, self-deprecating and he hoped witty, on the woman seated next to him on his connecting flight. He smiled, sticking his lower jaw out and showing his teeth. His teeth, he admitted to her, had become Europeanized during this last year. That red wine, that ink-dark little coffee in the dainty little cups, those gitanes, the very air in Europe, it tends to stain. Stains the dentine. There are reasons, you see, why everybody in Europe has such crappy teeth. But what can you do? And you know what? he asked the woman in the seat next to him. Avignon has more Italian restaurants than French. I hadn’t expected that. And Montpellier has more American restaurants than anything else.
“You mean,” the woman asked, “McDonalds?”
But Hector could tell she wasn’t really interested.
“Some,” he said. “But, you know, Steak Houses. Of course, it’s a big university town, Montpellier. Students love to eat American, fast food, steaks. That’s the reason I was there, actually, doing some work at the university.”
But she wasn’t interested, she wouldn’t be drawn, and when she started talking herself it became apparent that she was married, that she had a kid, and that Hector was on a hiding to nothing. He smiled and nodded as she talked, but not sticking his jaw right out, not the big beaming grin, just a polite smile, and a polite nod, and behind his eyes he was thinking, you could at least wear a damned ring on your finger, you could at least give me some heads-up.
At the airport he had to queue at the hire car desk. He told himself that a year in France had accustomed him to queuing; but as he stood there, looking through the glass walls of the terminal at the wide Californian view, the perfect blue of the Californian sky, the cars with their broad paneled paintwork glistening in the sunshine as if wet, some of his American impatience started to return. He fidgeted. He started sweating a little. Anger started warming inside him, although of course he kept it in check. At the head of the queue he was told that there would be a twenty-minute wait before he could be given the keys to his hire car. At least twenty minutes, we’re sorry sir.
“Why?”
“There’s been an unforeseen eventuality, sir,” said the clerk. “I do apologise, sir. We can offer you a coupon for a complimentary breakfast in Home Cookin’ whilst you wait, sir.”
“No, that’s OK,” said Hector. “I had breakfast on the plane, I’m good.”
2
When he finally got his car, when he finally drove out, he got lost on his route to the ranch.
The car’s air-con was either too cold, or else not cooling enough. He kept fiddling with it. He made a pit stop, picking up a couple of cans and something to smoke, and then drove on out, drove east into the desert. The signs of human habitation became poorer, sketchier; the gaps between buildings opened up, and soon he was leaving the major roads and driving lonely tarmac under the cyanide blue of a perfect Californian day. He fiddled continually with the radio tuner as he drove. None of the stations seemed capable of playing two good tunes one after the other. One good song, one shit song, that seemed to be the playlist of every music station within broadcast range.
He got lost. It was probably deliberate, on an unconscious level. He told himself this with some self-satisfaction at his powers of auto-psychoanalysis; getting lost was his own passive-aggressive response to his father’s passive-aggressive actions, his own subconscious way of saying “how am I supposed to find your fucking ranch? It’s in the middle of nowhere.” To sell a perfectly good house, and buy a stretch of desert miles from anywhere – how could that be construed as anything but passive aggression on his father’s part? Hector circled so completely, still, even at thirty-eight, in the symbolic orbital of his father, or rather circled the space his father occupied in his own cognitive map of the universe, that he could only understand this action (selling a house, buying a ranch) in relation to himself. What other explanation could there be? Dad was free to buy and sell what he liked, of course, he was free to dispose of his home, which only happened to be the house in which Hector had grown up, the house in which his mother had died – of course he could do that, if he wanted
to. He could buy some waterless ranch miles from anyway, if he wanted to. He could join some cult, or whatever the hell it was, and spend all his money on subterranean whatever cables, if he wanted to. But why would he want to? Except to piss with Hector’s head? And the lady on the radio was singing the song that told him, Hector, that he – made – her – feel, that he made her feel, like a nat-ur-al woman.
Hector sang along. But the next song was some Nashville crap, and he fiddled with the tuner again.
He stopped in a small town, in which there didn’t seem to be a single building more than one storey high. He asked in the drugstore for directions, but the guy serving there couldn’t help him. He stood on the main street for long minutes, in the heat, looking vaguely about, thinking maybe a cop could help him, but he couldn’t see a cop.
Above him the sky was a deep blue, a dark lacquered blue upon which a handful of high feathery clouds looked like scuffs. And there, tiny as a bug, was a plane, drawing two tiny, scratchy lines after it, crawling over the sky. Just visible was its boomerang wingspan, its missile fuselage. It looked like a Christmas ornament.
He bought a map at the gas station and spread it on the passenger seat. He’d parked in the sun, and the material of the seats was hot as if it had just that minute been ironed.
3
The two-hour drive took Hector four and a quarter hours, but finally he rolled up to the gates of his Dad’s new place.
Hector senior had thrown a fence around the whole area, but most of the land was in a dip or depression in the land so pulling up at the gate afforded a fine view of the ranch. There were half a dozen buildings, including several tall barns. Several heavy machines were visible, diggers, tractors. Huge spools of cable lay piled in the shade of one of the barns. Round-shouldered apricot-coloured hills dominated the horizon.
Hector pulled out his mobile and called his Dad’s land-line. After a dozen rings his Dad picked up.
“Dad? I’m here. I’m at the gate.”
“Yeah,” replied his father. He always, or so it seemed to Hector, began his sentences with this drawly, emphatic assertion of positivity. More than a tic it had become a self-caricaturing habit. “Why didn’t you use the intercom?”
“I’m using my mobile.”
“Yeah. Well, the gate’s open.”
And so it was. Hector got back in the car and nudged the gate open with the fender; and, not bothering to stop, get out, shut it again, he drove straight down the side of the little hill into the declivity where the ranch house was. Pulling up to park alongside a grey four-by-four, itself parked beside a truck, he could see his father standing on the porch with two other people.
Hector climbed out of the car, and pushed a smile to the front of his face. “Hi Dad, hi” he called, energetically. “Hey, you look great.” But he didn’t look great; his hair had thinned across the crown, and large amoeba-shaped freckles, horribly expressive of advancing age, had come into being across his broad brow and scalp. Old, old. But as he came up the steps of the porch one at a time, Hector was also aware of how he must look to his father; podgy, nervy, pale.
They hugged, Dad’s face swimming up close like an asteroid ready to crash into the world of Hector’s head, but swerving to one side at the last minute. The old man clapped his son’s back, and Hector returned the gesture, but there was little heat in it. Hector had seen something, something almost imperceptible, in his Dad’s eyes the fraction before they had actually embraced. It occurred to him, as if for the first time, that his father was actually scared by his son.
Not physically scared, of course; this tall, lean, still-muscular man could face no plausible physical threat from his shorter, jellied, breathless offspring. Not that, but something more abstract and therefore even more startling. Because Hector’s father was not one to spend too much mental energy on abstracts; and yet it was as if, looking at his son for the first time in a year and a half, the older man had experienced a sort of unnerving, a tremor in the soul. It was a revelation for Hector, who had always completely taken it for granted that his father was much stronger than he in character as well as in body; that this seemingly self-sufficient man might look nervously upon the arrival of his son to his house; that he might not know what to say; that he might be anxious about making a fool of himself, of simply having to interact with this other human being – this had literally never occurred to Hector before. And he had the miniaturely vertiginous sense of himself as his father must see him: not merely out-of-shape and fidgety, but as his own flesh and blood rendered implacably and impenetrably other by the process of growing up, of a monstrous hybrid between his father’s self and the safely alien other people in his father’s life.
The old man stood back, and looked at his son. “Yeah, guys,” he said, apparently talking directly at Hector but in fact addressing the two people standing behind him on the porch, “this is Hector junior. Hec, that’s,” he added with a hitchhiker’s gesture of his right thumb over his shoulder, “Tom Brideson and Vera Dimitrov, we call her Dimmi. She’s,” he went on, after an awkward little pause, “Bulgarian.” And then, after another pause, as if the thought were belatedly occurring to him that he should warn his son away from her, he added, “yeah, she’s with Tom, they’re a couple.”
“I’m delighted to meet you,” said Hector, relishing his chance to try on a little bit of his newly acquired, flouncy old-European manner.
“Good to meet you,” said Tom.
“Yes, nice to meet you,” said Vera, in accentless English.
Father and son stood looking at one another. The awkwardness was palpable, almost painful. “I got your book,” Hector senior said, shortly. The book had been, in fact, one issue of an academic journal, Art and Aesthetics, in which Hector had published an article about late Cézanne.
“Great,” said Hector, adding, superfluously, “I hope you didn’t read it. You didn’t need to read it.”
“Yeah,” said his father, meaning no. And then: “Marjorie not with you?”
Hector took this, almost eagerly, as an excuse to talk about himself. “To tell you the truth,” he said, rocking back on his heels, “Marj and I are going through a more distant period right now. We’re still amicable, we’re still on dinner-and-wine terms, but she’s in London now. I think she’s seeing a guy there. We parted on perfectly amicable terms. I mean, it was never as if we were going to get married.” But looking again at his father’s face he could see that these details were of no interest to him at all. A realization dawned.
“Oh,” he said, his shoulders slumping a little. “Did you ask that in our self-appointed capacity as the new frigging Noah?” He started into this sentence thinking it a witty observation, a chirpy son-to-father thing to say; but as soon as the words were spoken he realized how much venom he was expressing, how angry this ridiculous new phase in his Dad’s dotage was making him. His own rage unnerved him. “Two by two into the ark, Hec and his mate, is that it?”
Hector senior didn’t flinch. “Yeah,” he said.
4
He heard the whole story, but not in one continuous narrative: instead it came out in a couple of separate interchanges with his father, and with some of his father’s disciples. Hector junior took his small suitcase upstairs to a bare room with a single bed, and unpacked whilst his father stood in the doorway. The room had white walls and a plain crucifix over its single window. There was a deal dresser with glass handles screwed into the wall. There was no TV. “Yeah,” said Hector senior, “there’s a radio in the bottom drawer. It’s a wind-up radio.”
“Thanks,” said Hector.
“You hungry? We had lunch already. But – if you’re hungry?”
“So,” said Hector, “those two, the Bulgarian girl and the other guy, they are living here?”
“They live out back.”
“Out back?”
“The second building. There’s a group.”
Hector put a folded shirt in the top drawer. “I see,” he said. “Like a comm
une?”
“Yeah,” said his father, but he was shaking his head. “You might jump to that conclusion. But they’re allsorts. A dozen or so. Mix of genders.”
“This end of the frigging world,” said Hector, not looking at his father. He couldn’t bring himself to say fucking in his father’s presence. “It’s an extreme thing to believe, isn’t it? It’s old, Dad. It’s bent out of shape, don’t you think? Are they all religious, the ones staying?”
At first it seemed as if his Dad wasn’t going to answer. “I couldn’t lay the cables without them. Besides, we’ll need them later.” And then: “You want to have a look round the new place?”
“Sure,” said Hector.
They walked together around the half dozen buildings; the ranch house, and a newer barn-like building with a dozen rooms inside it. Another barn was filled with an astonishing mass of supplies, tinned food, seeds, huge drums of something or other, electrical equipment, mysterious crates. “You got a storehouse here,” Hector said, “that any survivalist would be proud to own.”
“Yeah,” said his Father.
The sun was so hot it felt like a heated cloth wrapped around Hector. It made his eyes water.
A group of half a dozen men and women were working out the back, spooling a fat serpent of cable from a large mechanized wheel on the back of a truck. The cable was going in the ground. Away in the direction of the lay, on the side of the hill, a second group were digging a hole. Hector senior introduced the cable-laying workers to his son, and Hector junior forgot all their names straight away.
As they walked back to the ranch house, Hector asked, “The cable?”
“A special carbon bond,” was the reply. “It’s a strengthening thing, yeah. It binds the land, strengthens it. The clever thing is that it has some give in it, it’s not too rigid, see, so it helps absorbs the tremors. It’ll keep the ranch in one piece.”
