1900 - The Will of an Eccentric by Jules Verne

NOTE: This review contains spoilers


Well, I am not really sure where to begin with this review.

I suppose firstly I should just reiterate what I have written in the header of this blog that I had not read any fiction book at all since 2007 before I read this. I have read all sorts of non-fiction books in that time (mainly political or sociological type stuff) but no stories as such.

I guess I am being a bit of a glutton for punishment by insisting that I will work through this task chronologically as not only am I trying to get into fiction again after a long break but also I am trying to get into a mindset from well over 100 years ago. And to compound it further with this first novel on my list it wasn't even originally written in English. It was published in French (in 1899) and published in translated form in 1900 (hence how it qualified for the year 1900).

To be honest it was hard work to get into it, perhaps for some of the reasons listed above. The prose style was somewhat inaccessible to me and I sometimes had to re-read paragraphs to understand their meaning. I also found that the speaking style of the protagonists was in a similar convoluted and contrived manner, so much so that it detracted from the story as even in 1900 in the USA (where the story is set) I am sure people simply didn't speak like that and I found this jarring.

But the premise had potential. Set in the late 19th Century, William J Hypperbone a very rich man and member of a Chicago based "Eccentrics" club dies suddenly and bequeaths his entire $60 Million estate to one of six people who appear to have been randomly chosen from the Chicago area electoral roll. The catch is that the six people all have to participate in a long form variation of the Game of the Goose (which I must confess before reading this book I had never heard of) with each state of the US forming one of the squares on the 63 square board of the game with Illinois appearing multiple times to make up the numbers. Every few days two dice are rolled and whoever's turn it is has to then progress by whatever means available to a specific place within the state their square pertains to. There are various fines and penalties applicable on certain squares which adds to the sense of jeopardy.

There is also a mysterious seventh player who enters the game as part of a codicil to the main will known only as XKZ.

There are great tracts of text in this book all about the scenery and locations that the various players visit during the game. There are multiple times where well over a page is given over to describing the look and history of places being traveled to or passed through. I found this somewhat tedious and superfluous. Often a few sentences would have sufficed to set the scene. It felt like padding a lot of the time. In addition most of the characters are caricatures who are either ridiculously good or totally self-centred and nasty.

One good thing the book did for me though was to make me realise that not that long ago, only just outside of living memory how difficult it would have been to travel from e.g. Chicago to the southern tip of Florida. What nowadays could be done in a few hours or a day at most via a couple of flights and a pleasant taxi ride at the end, in the book was a treacherous journey using several trains, a boat that gets shipwrecked and finally a horse driven carriage. It's easy to forget just how simple national and international travel is these days and how our forefathers would be astonished at this fact.

There is a big twist in the story and I had guessed it pretty early on. XKZ is actually William J Hypperbone himself who is not dead after all. And he wins the competition. Although he insists that had he not have won he would have given his entire fortune to the actual winner.

Two of the players end up marrying each other (which I had also predicted) and Hypperbone himself proposes to the best friend and companion of one of these players and pledges half his estate to her friend in his will.

So all's well that ends well.

There is a strange statement at the end of the book which essentially amounts to: "If you think this book was far-fetched then please bear in mind it all happened in the United States of America". I'm not really sure why Verne felt the need to put that in.

There was one other slightly odd aspect to my experiences with this book. There were typos distributed throughout it. In some cases the ends of sentences had extraneous ampersands and other characters appended. Some words were capitalised unnecessarily and some words that should have been two words were elided. Having contemplated this a little my best guess as to what has happened here is that the publisher did not have access to an electronic copy of the source text for the book so they have scanned it in from a hard copy and the optical character recognition parser has messed up in a few places. Because the book is out of copyright I guess it makes sense to do this but it's pretty shoddy that nobody appears to even have proof-read it. The edition with these problems was published in 2013 by Kassock Bros. Publishing Co. USA. In case you're interested.

All in all this first book of my 100 novels of the 20th century was not a particularly pleasurable read. I felt it was overlong, inaccessible and predictable with poorly drawn characters.

This is perhaps reflected in the fact that it took me two months to finish reading it! Every time I thought I should do another chapter or two it just felt like a huge chore. Hopefully this will not be the case with most of the other books in my quest. Otherwise it will take me the best part of two decades to complete it!

In fact my experience with this book has made me take another decision which is that although I am still going to continue with this task of reading the 100 novels of the 20th century in chronological order, I am going to interleave them with modern fiction. So every time I finish one of the quest novels I'll then read something much more contemporary as a mental palette cleanser which I was surely in need of after book number one!

I will not trouble you dear reader with the details of the palette cleanser books but suffice to say I have already finished one and only took about 3 days.

So now I will crack on with the second book on my quest. Kim by Rudyard Kipling.

Hopefully this one won't take as long as the first one. Watch this space for the next review.