Recent Reading: Jules Verne's THE FUR COUNTRY (1873)

I try to read at least a couple of Jules Verne titles each year, and just finished reading and very much enjoying THE FUR COUNTRY (subtitled, "Or, Seventy Degrees North Latitude"). It was not a title that particularly attracted me, being about the year-long sojourn of a group of soldiers, trappers, astronomers, and one winningly assertive female traveler to the northern coastline of Canada to establish a furrier factory. This premise led me to imagine scenes of hunting and slaughter, hence its putting me off—as I suspect it might others. However, it was the last of Verne’s first dozen novels I still hadn’t read, so I had to read it.

While there are some hunting and skinning scenes, they are not described in the detail found in Verne's earlier THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN HATTERAS, for example. It is more the book's point to tell a more engrossing story of families and co-workers fighting the elements to survive, and the deepening sense of community that is fostered by their collective endurance of harsh winters, volcanic disturbances, threatening iceberg collisions, and more.

I don’t want to spoil what should come as a major surprise but a major upheaval occurs halfway through the book, altering the entire dimension (indeed, the geography) of the story and taking the tension to a much higher level. My only criticism of the book is that its large cast of some twenty-one characters is thinly rendered. While Verne's depiction of the courtly civility and emotions of various protagonists is at times moving, he never really stops documenting the minutiae of environmental causes-and-effects long enough to bring any individual character substantially to life. A lone polar bear foraging on the story's periphery is better delineated than many of its people. An interesting side-effect of not introducing a traditional love story into the account is that Verne instead writes a stirring account of how platonic friendship are enriched and strengthened under tremendous pressure and adversity. Finally, a methodical and brilliantly detailed first half builds to a startling change of... well, everything in the second. While the book overall is not one of Verne’s best, it's nonetheless a worthy addition to his inspired initial run of Extraordinary Voyages.

(c) 2022 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.

Subscribe to Tim Lucas / Video WatchBlog by Email

If you enjoy Video WatchBlog, your kind support will help to ensure its continued frequency and broader reach of coverage.