Jules Verne - Around the World in 80 Days

So, umm. I thought Around the World in 80 Days was going to involve a hot air balloon, like in the movie. But the book contains zero hot air balloons! It turns out that the movie adaptation had mashed Around the World up with Jules Verne's other book Five Weeks in a Balloon to cause this (probably quite common) perception.

Anyway it's a good thing there were no hot air balloons. Instead, Phileas Fogg travels the world by steamship and rail as part of a £20,000 wager with his "friends" at the Reform Club. This is probably not very exciting to most people, but I am a public transport geek, so it ticked my boxes. Around the World is also not at all sci-fi - all of the transport tech was already in place at the time Verne wrote it in 1872. But around this period there were some major new developments that were part of the colonisation arms race. 

There was the Suez Canal, linking Europe with Asia, making it possible to reach India by sea in record time. This was the first leg of Fogg and (his manservant) Passepartout's adventure. 

Then the British built railways across the Indian subcontinent, connecting Bombay in the west to Calcutta in the east. That was the second leg, where Fogg and Passepartout's adventure began to go awry - having missed an important travel connection, Fogg had to spend crazy money to hire an elephant to catch up. They also picked up the erstwhile suttee victim, Aouda.

From Calcutta it would have been a series of steamships: first to Hong Kong, then Hong Kong to Yokohama, then Yokohama across the Pacific to America. That's the third leg. More travel disruptions ensued - requiring Fogg to spend more money - like chartering private boats and so on.

The fourth leg was when they landed in San Francisco and took the newly-completed railway linking the east and west. While Verne was pretty touch-and-go with the previous legs of the trip, here he was beautifully descriptive; I loved reading about the turn-down sleeper service and the Mormon preacher on board.

In the final act Fogg misses the steamship from New York to Liverpool, but he (again) throws money at it, buying a ship to sail across on his own.

Well this table from Wikipedia explains it all better than I have:

The itinerary (as originally planned)

London to Suez, Egypt	Rail to Brindisi, Italy, via Turin and steamer (the Mongolia) across the Mediterranean Sea	7 days
Suez to Bombay, India	Steamer (the Mongolia) across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean	13 days
Bombay to Calcutta, India	Rail	3 days
Calcutta to Victoria, Hong Kong with a stopover in Singapore	Steamer (the Rangoon) across the South China Sea	13 days
Hong Kong to Yokohama, Japan	Steamer (the Carnatic) across the South China Sea, East China Sea, and the Pacific Ocean	6 days
Yokohama to San Francisco, United States	Steamer (the General Grant) across the Pacific Ocean	22 days
San Francisco to New York City, United States	Rail	7 days
New York to London, United Kingdom	Steamer (the China) across the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool and rail	9 days
Total		80 days

Anyway, apart from the fun of plotting out the routes and excitement around catching tight departures, the rest of the story left me quite cold. I hated all of the characters - I suppose they're not meant to be more than 2-dimensional - and Fogg's standard trick of throwing more money at problems got really old. You can't even say he's resourceful because his sole resource is money. 

I'm pretty sure Verne (a Frenchman) meant to satirise the English. Fogg is VERY Victorian - a clockwork human, stiffest upper lip ever, no attachment whatsoever to his wealth. Meanwhile his French servant, Passepartout, is the clumsy emotional one, all bluster and human weakness.