Around The World In Eighty Days/The Other Log Of Phileas Fogg: The Full Account by Jules Verne & Philip José Farmer (book review).
In ‘A Note from the publisher on publication of The Full Account’ Michael Croteau states:-
‘The book opens with ‘Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages Around the World’, in which Henry G. Franke III tells us all about the career of Jules Verne, how his work was edited to fit in with the publisher’s ideas of what he needed, and suffered from English translations that varied from bad to adequate, and occasionally outright censorship. This led to his work having been dismissed as lightweight adventure stories, best left to children.’
The influence of Edgar Allen Poe on Verne’s writing is also examined. This all left me wishing there would be an extensive annotated retranslating of his entire oeuvre, to be published in a nice, matching set of hardcovers that I would no doubt not be able to afford.
Then Verne expert Henry G. Franke III goes on to examine how Philip José Farmer brings in characters from other Verne novels in his alternative narrative, a certain submarine captain in particular, and shows how this is very much in keeping with Verne’s own ideas. In fact, he wrote a play titled ‘Journey Through the Impossible’, which combined characters and settings from several of his books, but his publisher simply wasn’t interested. It didn’t see print until 2003, and then only in English. Franke posits that Farmer would have found this fascinating, and perhaps Verne wouldn’t have found ‘The Other Log of Phileas Fogg’ all that surprising.
This is followed by Farmer’s original foreword and introduction, which appeared in all previous editions of ‘The Other Log of Phileas Fogg’. Here, Farmer describes how a diary in London revealed additional details that Verne was not aware of. Notebooks unearthed in Derbyshire allowed a noted linguist of the University of Oxford, Sir Beowulf William Clayton, fourth baronet, to translate the diary into a previously unknown language.
You will note that from this point on, the focus shifts from what Franke believes is a mere series of connected fictions to Farmer’s contention that it’s all based on fact. I know where my instincts lie on this. It’s up to the individual reader to make up their own mind.
I knew going in that this juxtaposition of Verne’s original text with Farmer’s version would be interesting. I’d read both separately in years past, but not until I started this book did I realise quite how much it would shine a light on the sheer brilliance of Farmer’s work. Things that just passed me by in Verne’s text certainly did not pass Farmer by. He notes the true meaning behind Verne’s seemingly throwaway comment about how Fogg strongly resembled Lord Byron in features, but ‘a Byron with moustache and whiskers, a Byron without emotions, who might have lived for a thousand years without growing old’. He explains the decidedly odd behaviour of Fogg, his original servant, Foster, and his new servant, Passepartout. After reading the required text, I felt as though I was receiving a briefing on certain secrets that were not widely known to the world. I felt privileged indeed.
It had been mentioned in publisher Meteor House’s progress reports that this wasn’t going to be as easy a job as simply alternating between chapters of Verne’s novel and Farmer’s version. Farmer didn’t read a chapter of the original and then write his account of what was really going on. This is evidenced very early on by the fact that we get the second and third chapters of Verne before we get updated on Farmer’s version. It’s here, though, that we really start to see how cleverly Farmer picks up on small, odd details in what Verne wrote and shows us the reasons behind them.
I have to say, though, that I couldn’t help but be surprised at the lack of security claimed by Verne and accepted by Farmer for the Bank of England in the Victorian era. I have no problem with the idea that ordinary folks would never get past the doors, but the concept of them having just left cash and gold laying around because their clientele were all gentlemen and wouldn’t even think of stealing anything is hard to accept. Maybe it was the case back then, but it doesn’t seem likely.
I won’t be spoiling anything by revealing that this is where a bet is made and Phileas Fogg sets out to prove his claim that he can circumnavigate the globe in the minimum possible time claimed by the newspaper without worrying about any problematic delays. It’s a wager that could be considered insane had Farmer not given us the reasons behind it.
Chapter four covers the very beginning of their journey as they leave London. Farmer makes good use here of what seems to be an error or mistranslation in Verne’s account: that it takes Fogg and Passepartout rather longer to complete one very early stage of their journey than would make sense to anyone familiar with the area. This rather reminded me of an issue of ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ in which our hero came to London and was seen swinging between two famous London landmarks on his web. Landmarks that happened to be several miles apart!
Farmer makes more out of a minor event in Verne, in which Fogg gives the twenty guineas he’d won earlier that day, a very considerable sum at the time, to a beggar woman and her infant child. Farmer states, ‘The Western capitals seldom see them now, but then they were an all-too-familiar sight, as common as they are in present-day Bogota, Colombia.’ If only they were as rare a sight in London and other Western capitals nowadays as Farmer believed they were in 1973!
While most readers are likely to be familiar with Verne’s version of the story and many with both, I will avoid continuing with a chapter-by-chapter comparison at this point to avoid spoilers.
Another way in which Farmer is clever in his explanations for the lapses of logic in Verne is that he often offers more than one possible explanation while giving his opinion as to which seems more likely—that or he was simply giving the facts as he saw them.
One of the more extreme cases of Verne’s account differing from Farmer’s comes when circumstances separate the travellers for a few chapters. A decision is taken that makes no logical sense whatsoever, but Verne needed it to make his version of the plot work, which he couldn’t see happening had the decision gone the other way. The farmer, on the other hand, was in possession of much more information and was able to tell the truth in this instance.
Another odd thing in this section is that Farmer simply glosses over four chapters of Verne’s book with just a few paragraphs, which were there mainly to point out the aforementioned mistake. The thought of combining the two accounts into one book never even occurred to Farmer, yet he seems to be aware that going over the ground covered by these four chapters in any detail would simply be repetitious, as he had nothing else of note to add.
That wasn’t the only part of Verne’s novel Farmer skimmed over very quickly. The first half of the trek across America is pretty much a travelogue, with Verne sharing his opinions on the town planning, the architecture, and the mating habits of Mormons. I suspect, in this case, it was more a matter of Farmer judging that his readers were likely to know most of this stuff already, and, frankly, this part of Verne’s account did come close to being a tad boring. It’s actually fascinating to see how Farmer compressed some less important parts of Verne’s book and made room to expand on the material that Verne was unaware of.
I have always been amused by the line towards the end of Verne’s account, where he states that [Fogg] ‘had employed every means of conveyance in doing so: steamers, railways, carriages, yachts, elephants, and sleighs.’ This is, of course, inaccurate, as he fails to mention the first thing so many people would say when asked what methods of transport were used in the journey. But in either account, does Fogg go anywhere near a hot air balloon? That was an addition common to so many of the film and TV adaptations, which became so entrenched in the public consciousness that even the covers of many editions of the novel depicted a hot air balloon.
Farmer’s version of events necessarily contains a good bit more material towards the end of the book, as one might expect, and a few more maybe not quite as well-known characters from other books make an appearance, but it does end in more or less the same place. I have to say that I genuinely feel that the combination of Verne and Farmer is actually greater than the sum of its parts and highly recommend this volume to fans of either or, indeed, to those who may not yet read either one.
But there’s more! ‘A Submersible Subterfuge Or Proof Impositive’ by H.W. Starr is a reprint of an article originally published in ‘Leaves From The Copper Beeches’, published for The Sons of the Copper Beeches Scion Society of the Baker Street Irregulars by the Livingston Publishing Co., Narberth, PA.
Starr closely examines both ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’ and ‘Mysterious Island’ and points out the huge number of inconsistencies in the dates that prove that these two novels, covering the life of Captain Nemo, cannot possibly both be true and that ‘Mysterious Island’, at the very least, has to be entirely the product of Verne’s mind. This article obviously laid the groundwork for Farmer’s portrayal of Nemo as far less noble than Verne’s.
In the next reprinted essay, ‘Only a Coincidence: Phileas Fogg, Philip José Farmer, and the Wold Newton Family’, this time from 2012, Win Scott Eckert lays out the evidence that Philip José Farmer was himself likely to be a member of the Wold Newton family. These were the ancestors of the 14 people and their coachmen, who were so close to the famous meteorite strike in the Yorkshire Wolds on December 13, 1795, at 3:00 p.m. that they were irradiated, which caused their progeny to develop extraordinary intelligence and skills. Look it up; even if you choose, as so many do, not to believe the rest, the meteorite strike is a documented fact!
I confess that I, even having read this several times in its previous printings, still have trouble keeping all the names and dates straight in my head. I often wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to have PhD courses available on the subject. We do get a very useful diagram of the Fogg-Farmer family tree, which does help a lot.
Whether you find it easier to follow than I did or not, I guarantee that reading this article will leave you with a list of books that you really want to read.
Also, from 2012, and even more useful, is Eckert’s ‘A Chronology of Major Events Pertinent to ‘The Other Log of Phileas Fogg’ with selected entries from Philip José Farmer’s ‘Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke’, Farmer’s ‘Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life’ and other sources’. It’s entirely up to the individual reader whether or not they take this as truth or fiction, but I tend to feel that had it been entirely made up, there wouldn’t be so much difference of opinion between individual Wold Newton Family scholars as to who exactly was related to whom and in what way.
The final contribution from Win Scott Eckert is ‘Being An Account Of The Delay At Green River, Wyoming, Of Phileas Fogg, World Traveller’, a story originally published as a Meteor House chapbook in 2016. Here, Eckert clears up another problem in ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ concerning times and distances that were clearly unworkable. A suppressed part of the tale sees Fogg teaming up with a certain masked lawman to avert a race war that a tong leader, who would later become much more powerful and infamous, was starting, albeit with some justification.
I had, I confess, rather assumed that Eckert’s story would tell the tale of Passepartout and the other passengers’ rescue from the marauding Indians who had overwhelmed the train that he, Fogg, and Aouda were travelling on. Having found that assumption to be incorrect, I was very pleased to find that the particular omission in both Verne and Farmer’s versions of events was covered by Dennis E. Power. ‘Passing Through the Hands of Steel’ (originally published by Black Coat Press in 2011 in ‘Tales of the Shadowmen’), in which Passepartout encounters yet more interesting characters, some of whom I had to look up, completes the ‘Full Account’ in a most satisfactory manner.
It would be remiss of me not to mention that this book also includes all the illustrations by Jack Gaughan and Rick Bryant from the 1973 DAW edition and the 1982 TOR Books edition of ‘The Other Log Of Phileas Fogg’ respectively, plus a very stylish cover by M.S. Corley.
Having read this huge 526-page tome, I can confidently state that this is by far the best way to read both source books. Both Verne and Farmer gain from the combination of their individual visions.
The signed, limited hardcover is only available directly from Meteor House, so it wasn’t issued an ISBN number. The ISBN of the paperback is 978-1-945427-29-9.
I’m told by the publisher that a few copies of the signed, limited hardcover are still available to purchase via the website, but I suspect you’ll have to be quick to get one.
Dave Brzeski
March 2024
(pub: Meteor House, 2024. 526 pages. Enlarged paperback: Price: $29.00 (US). ISBN: 978-1-945427-29-9. Hardback: $75.00 (US). Limited Edition; Price: $94.00 (US)
check out website: https://meteorhousepress.com/the-full-account/