The Mysterious Island

Jules Verne's The Mysterious Island gave the world a balloon escape from a Confederate prison, a Pacific island built into a civilization by sheer ingenuity, and Captain Nemo dying in his submarine beneath the waves. It also gave the world Neb, a Black man from Cameroon, faithful and steady, present on every page and absent from every sentence that mattered. Richard Lowe's reimagining corrects that absence. Told through the private record of Gideon Spilett, correspondent for the New York Herald, The Mysterious Island is the account Verne's sanitized version was based on, the one Spilett chose not to publish. An unreliable narrator by his own admission, Spilett watches everything and understands less than he thinks. He watches Nebuchadnezzar, called Neb, with the careful attention of a man who has spent twenty years recording what he sees and the blind spot of one who has never had to look at the world from Neb's position. What he misses, and what the reader sees, is that Neb is not the faithful servant of the published account. He is the moral center of the island, the one person who sees each of the others clearly and asks, from the first morning on the shore, what it means to be free on ground that belongs to no one. The ensemble Spilett assembles around him is built on interlocking secrets. Cyrus Harding, the brilliant engineer who holds the group together, is hiding a massacre. Pencroft, the Scottish sailor, is hiding a grief that has organized his entire adult life. Magdalena Vásquez, the New Mexican widow who joins their number, is hiding leverage - and knows how to use it. Herbert is hiding the fact that he is becoming someone his hero would not recognize. And Captain Nemo, watching all of them from beneath the sea for two years before he surfaces, has seen everything and understood almost everything and missed, catastrophically, the one thing that mattered most. Set during and after the American Civil War, The Mysterious Island is a novel about who gets to be a full person on the page, who gets to keep secrets, and what it costs to be seen completely and seen wrong. It follows Verne's architecture faithfully and arrives somewhere Verne never went.