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(8) Une ville flottante (A Floating City, 1871) (1 volume) 37K words

The eight novel in Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires is the shortest one yet (it's barely more than a novella). In the original Hetzel edition it was paired with the short story The Blockade Runners. This review is only for the novel. I'll get to the short stories later.


First read or reread?: This is a first read for me.


What is it about?: A Floating City tells the story of a trip across the Atlantic on the steamship Great Eastern, which was by far the largest ship ever built at the time of its launch in 1858. The novel was the direct result of the trip which Verne actually made to America in 1867 on that ship. He gives us a faithful picture of the incidents of an ocean voyage of those days, enlivening these by introducing a romance aboard ship.


This is certainly not among the best-known Verne novels nowadays, although it was quite successful in its time. The novel is told in first person by an unnamed narrator and it has two mayor threads: One of them is a travel narrative, including a description of the ship, of life and entertainment aboard, how periods of bad weather were handled, etc, and the other is a romantic story involving a friend of the narrator who has had his heart broken when his fiancé was married for financial reasons to a morally disreputable man. All the people involved are also traveling on the ship, so the conflict is certain.

The main characters include the unnamed narrator; Captain Fabian Mac Elwyn, his broken-hearted friend; Captain Archibald Corsican, another friend of Fabian's and his regiment mate in the British Indian Army; Ellen Hodges, Fabian's former fiancé; Harry Drake, her villainous husband; and Doctor Pitferge, another friend they make who is convinced that the ship is destined to sink.

I found it a very pleasant read. I enjoyed the travel narrative. Obviously Verne has first-hand experience of this huge ship, so large and with so many passengers that it's compared to a floating town. That personal experience allows for a quite grounded and realistic narration. There are none of the outlandish elements of tales like Around the Moon, where the spaceship feels more like a Victorian sitting-room, or In Search of the Castaways, where the Andes are exaggeratedly depicted as an unstable mountain range filled with active volcanos and huge landslides. And Verne has an engaging way of describing the trip and the ship. I particularly enjoy how earnest he is, and how joyful when it comes to technical achievements (although there is also an unquiet feeling at how vulnerable even this huge ship is before the natural forces of the ocean).

This is a fast read, with a good pace and some humor in the dialogues. There are none of those Verne scientific info-dumps. The closest thing is the initial description of the ship, but it's handled quite quickly.

The adventure element, involving the narrator's friend and his romantical problems, is also handled well. It's nothing exotic or high concept, like many of Verne's stories, but it does provide tension, conflict and even danger. Funnily enough, even though this is the first time I read this novel, I guessed how this plot thread was going to end, based on my knowledge of Verne's dramatic style and some foreshadowing. Again, it's a satisfying resolution, which is something I have commented in a previous review: Verne knows how to give his readers a good payoff.


Enjoyment factor: This is a short and relatively low-key Verne novel, half romantic adventure and half travel story. I found it quite pleasant. It shows a different side of Verne, almost cosy, without his science-fictional elements, his popular science descriptions and his more intense adventures.


Next up: The Adventures of Three Englishmen and Three Russians in South Africa