Toilers of the Sea

Victor Hugo, William Moy Thomas (translator)

★★★★☆

It’s a little weird to start your book dedicated to the small community that took you in when you were exiled with several chapters about how superstitious and distrustful of outsiders the people here are. But this is Victor Hugo, and he doesn’t take the easy way out. (He does insist that he’s talking only about the Guernesey of several decades before his time, not his neighbors.)

It’s an interesting read, though, and a tighter structure than Les Misérables (unless the 1877 translation I read is seriously abridged, which it doesn’t indicate). The first half of the book builds up to a storm at sea and a shipwreck, and the rest is mostly one really determined man’s attempt to salvage the steamship’s engine, alone, out on the rocks in the middle of the channel. It takes him months, using only a handful of tools he brought and what parts he could salvage from the wreck, even building a makeshift forge in a hollow in the rocks.

Other characters include the steamship owner and his daughter, a former partner who ran off with half the money, and the captain who replaced him (and ultimately wrecks the ship). The build-up to the wreck is a bit of a slog until you start putting together the pieces that are deliberately left unsaid or appear contradictory, so that by the time the wreck happens you have a pretty good idea of why it happens.

It’s mostly man vs. nature, but this being Hugo, there’s social commentary too. Trusting or distrusting people for the wrong reasons, religious intolerance and superstitions, the hazards of overconfidence, misplaced righteousness, paying attention to what’s actually going on rather than what you expect to be going on, and so forth.

One bit that stuck in my head was the ruined steamship owner repeatedly rejecting advice from an old clergyman on where he can invest his remaining funds for a large return: selling weapons to Russia, where the Czar wants to put down a Polish peasant rebellion, or investing in these new plantations spreading into Texas (worked by slaves of course). The old clergyman just doesn’t understand why the guy won’t take his advice, while his younger colleague, newly arrived to the island, tries to explain that he’s listening to his conscience.

Over and Under

I remembered the novel being mentioned on the Les Misérables Reading Companion a few years back, and grabbed a copy when Standard Ebooks released their version. Then I forgot about it like a discounted Steam game for a couple of years, until I got to the point in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea where the narrator admits he couldn’t even begin to describe what he saw, as it would need a poet like Victor Hugo to write something like Toilers of the Sea.

OK, sometimes I can take a hint!

Reading them back to back really brings out the difference in writing styles between Hugo and Verne. Verne wants to tell you what happened, maybe what the main character is thinking of (even if it’s a long list of fish), and what’s salient about the setting. Hugo wants to paint you a complete picture. Verne would write about a man clinging to a piece of wreckage floating in the middle of the ocean. Hugo would describe the expanse of the ocean, the color of the sky, how much cloud cover (and what kind of clouds), how strong the wind is, any birds or islands visible in the distance, are the waves slow and calm or choppy…then zoom in on the bit of wreckage…and only when the scene is fully painted zoom in on the figure clinging desperately to it.

I think Hugo spends more time describing how creepy an octopus can be before one seizes Gilliat than Verne spends on the whole battle between the Nautilus and the giant squid!