At the start of Journey to the Centre of the Earth we meet Axel, our narrator, who’s in his late teens at the point when the story opens in Hamburg in May 1863. His parents are dead, and in the “dual capacity of nephew and orphan” he lives with his uncle, one Professor Lidenbrock, and works as his lab assistant. Lidenbrock, who is described on the first page of the book as “the most impatient of men,” is a mineralogist who also collects old books, and it’s from one of those old books that the plot arises. Lidenbrock shows Axel a Runic manuscript he’s just bought, a book from Iceland that’s seven hundred years old, and while they’re looking at it, a piece of parchment—also in runes, and apparently in code—falls to the floor. It’s this piece of parchment and what it says that prompts Lidenbrock to start preparing, with the greatest haste, for a trip to Iceland. But Iceland isn’t the point of the trip, as Axel tries to explain to Martha (his uncle’s long-suffering cook/maid) in this hilarious passage:
‘Is the Master out of his mind?’ she asked me.
I nodded.
‘And he’s taking you with him?’
I nodded again.
‘Where?’ she asked.
I pointed towards the centre of the earth.
‘Into the cellar?’ exclaimed the old servant.
‘No,’ I said, ‘farther down than that.’
So, right: Axel and his uncle set off to Reykjavik by way of Copenhagen, and Axel is convinced that they’ll never make it home alive: isn’t the center of the earth much too hot to visit? And won’t it be terribly perilous even to try? Indeed, Axel and his uncle both have their trials before they even get to Iceland: Axel is afraid of heights, so his uncle makes him climb the narrow stairs up the outside of a church spire, one day after the next. “You must take lessons in abysses,” Lidenbrock says, and Axel doesn’t really have a choice. Lidenbrock, meanwhile, gets terribly seasick, which makes the ten-day boat-ride to Iceland extremely unpleasant for him. But they get to Iceland, and get themselves a guide, and set off. Axel describes the landscape as they approach their destination as “profoundly dismal” and worries that the volcano into whose cone they’re planning to descend might not be extinct at all. His uncle assures him that the volcano is definitely not going to explode imminently, and Axel lets himself be convinced.
Without going into the details of the rest of the journey, it is rather perilous, but it’s also, as Diana Wynne Jones puts it in the introduction to the edition I read, “a thoroughly exciting adventure story.” And while some aspects of the plot feel silly now, I’m still glad I read this—though I kind of wish I’d read it in French rather than in an English translation.
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