20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Being the True Account of Captain Nemo and the Nautilus - Richard Lowe

The Nautilus has taken three prisoners. One of them, Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner pulled from the ocean after the ship he was sailing was rammed and disabled by something beneath the surface, wants out from the first day and never stops counting. He counts days the way a man counts because counting is the only form of control available to him. He watches hatches. He maps the interior. He waits.

The second prisoner, Professor Aronnax, is a French naturalist who arrived planning to escape and has quietly stopped planning. The wonder of what he has been shown is doing its work on him. He catalogs what he sees. He asks questions. He has begun to forget, in small ways, that he is not here by choice.

The third is not a prisoner. Lakara is Nemo's executive officer, his second in command, the hardest person either man has encountered in a life full of difficult people. She has been aboard the Nautilus since 1853. She has not been back to America since the early 1850s, when she identified a winter camp in the Powder River country for a massacre that was covered up before the ink was dry. She does not volunteer this information. She deals with problems fast and does not mention them again.

Captain Nemo cages his prisoners with gravity rather than cruelty. He believes he is offering them something. He is a man who gave up the world after the world destroyed everything he had, built something extraordinary beneath the ocean's surface, and has been using it to make unilateral decisions about who lives and who dies ever since. The novel is not sure he is wrong to believe what he believes. It is sure that the people in his submarine did not consent to the lesson.

A reimagining of Jules Verne's 1870 classic told from the perspective of Ned Land, present tense, immediate, physical, with alternating chapters from inside Nemo's past-tense interior. The coral cemetery. The giant squid. The warship whose nationality is deliberately withheld, because the point is not who it is. The point is that Nemo does it and Aronnax has to decide what that means about the man he has been accommodating. The Maelstrom. The escape. What Ned keeps afterward. What he cannot put down.

Book One of The Adventures of Captain Nemo. The Victorian Era Series. The Writing King. Literary fiction. Inspired by Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea