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(42) Face au drapeau (Facing the Flag, 1896) (1 volume) 55K words


The 42nd Extraordinary Voyage takes us to a small island in the Antilles, although it's not a travel story, but a techno-thriller and a cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advance, when it comes to the creation of more powerful weapons. With this novel, along with "The Begum's Millions", Verne anticipated the creation of weapons of mass destructions.


First read or reread?: A reread for me. I read it a long time ago and enjoyed it, without it being one of my favorites.


What is it about?: Thomas Roch, a French inventor, claims he has designed the Fulgurator, a weapon so powerful that "the state which acquired it would become absolute master of earth and ocean." However, because of his unreasonable demands and refusal to demonstrate the power of his invention, he is unable to sell his idea to France and, later, to any other government. Losing his grip on sanity, Roch becomes increasingly bitter, megalomaniacal and paranoid. Eventually, the United States Government imprisons him at a luxurious asylum in New Bern, North Carolina. There, his caretaker is a man called Gaydon, who is secretly a French engineer called Simon Hart, trying to prevent the secret of Roch's discovery from being lost. As the novel starts, a wealthy foreigner calling himself the "Count d'Artigas" visits the asylum and its famous inmate, with suspicious intentions.


After "Propeller Island", which had elements of interest but also some rather dull parts, Verne is back to his usual narrative good form. This is a short and fast novel (fast for a Victorian era novel, anyway). Most of it is told in first person from the point of view of the engineer Simon Hart, kidnapped along with the inventor Thomas Roch. Amid a sensation of constant danger, the story moves at a nice pace.

The novel is linked to a part of Verne's later career characterized by dark, misanthropic themes and pessimism about scientific progress. Later, we will have more examples of this, like his novel "Master of the World". However, as I have mentioned in other reviews, you can't really say "during this period, Verne's novels are pessimistic". It's a theme that appears occasionally in his work, more often in the later part of his career, but we have clear examples of it as early as "The Begum's Millions", and he also wrote traditionally optimistic tales later on.

Another point I'd like to make is that "pessimistic" does not mean by any means that this story is a downer and everything in it is depressing. Just that this gleeful belief in science and human resourcefulness that permeates a lot of his work is replaced by a more wary, cautionary attitude. I personally enjoy his "optimistic" stories more, but this was a good read.

In the novel, we find elements that Verne had explored in previous works: the use of submarines ("Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea"), ballistics ("From the Earth to the Moon", "The Begum's Millions"), patriotism (playing a larger role here than in any previous Verne novel), the enigmatic person using a figured name (Nemo, Robur, Mathias Sandorf), madness ("Mistress Branican" and some later novels with mad scientists, like "Master of the World", "The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz" and "The Barsac Mission"), volcanism ("Journey to the Center of the Earth" and several others), etc.

Despite all the recurrent Vernian themes, I feel the author kept things fresh throughout his career by occasionally trying genres and plots different from the ones usually associated with him. "Facing the Flag" certainly did not invent the mad inventor (see Frankenstein, for example), but it's one of the early examples (curiously, this novel was published the same year as "The Island of Doctor Moreau" by H. G. Wells, then at the beginning of his career). But beyond that, I think the James Bond stories owe a lot to "Facing the Flag".

As a curiosity, after the publication of this book, Verne and his publisher were sued by French chemist Eugène Turpin, inventor of the Melinite, who recognized himself in the character of Roch. To be fair, Turpin was not a madman, and had not gone around the world offering his invention to the highest bidder (only to France). Nevertheless, I'm glad the lawsuit was unsuccessful, because if writers are not allowed to be inspired by real people, without using their names, we would lose a lot of novels. Another possible inspiration for Roch was Alfred Nobel, inventor among other things of the dynamite, who later regretted having brought such destructive force into the world (Nobel actually was accused of high treason against France for selling ballistite to Italy).


Enjoyment factor: I enjoyed this. Quite short, and I'm glad Verne was back to form after a rather boring novel "Propeller Island". As I said, I prefer Verne novels with more optimistic themes. They capture my imagination better. But this one was good and entertaining. It's not exactly science fiction, but I would call it a Victorian near-future techno-thriller.


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