Where Verne Poses Lots of Moral Questions and Tells a Fun Story

The Blockade Runners by Jules Verne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an entertaining and enlightening short work. I liked it.

At about 20,000 words, you can consider this as either a long novelette or a short novella. Either way, it's a nice length for the story it told, IMO, though I could easily see this fleshed out into a novel of 80K-100K without harm. It would also make a good movie without changing a thing. Maybe there's already a movie. I dunno.

Written in 1865 and set just a few years earlier, taking place in the middle part of the American Civil War, this opens my eyes a little to the way Europe could have been viewing the conflict and how it affected their lives. From a Scottish viewpoint, the war disrupted trade, making it very difficult to get enough cotton to keep the mills in operation. Naturally, that puts businessmen (the ones not too interested in the morality of the question) on the side of the South. It was strange but informative to see sympathetic characters, people who are apparently decent people in other ways, siding with slavers and finding arguments to be blame the North (here called the Federals) to the point that they considered them in the wrong. That really struck me, even though I know I'd been taught this in history class. Something about fiction gets through, you know? It made me realize that the mills in England and Scotland had been a part of the slavery business from the start. A lot of people's wealth depended on the exploitation of enslaved people.

(Crimes have a way of spreading, don't they? Especially big ones. They start compromising everyone connected in any way. That extends to the lawyers and the bankers and the politicians as well, not just the businessmen. Hmmmm.)

It's horrifying as well instructive to see how easy it is for people to deny the humanity of others, especially if it's in their own economic self-interest. What makes the lesson so useful to me is realizing that this was written during the events of the war, in real time, while it was affecting Americans one way and Europeans in another. Hearing the debates and being privy to the thinking of people in 1865 means a lot more than reading a modern account of what people thought back then.

I was happy to see the main character, James Playfair, get turned around a bit when he takes the side of a young woman whose father, a journalist and fervent abolitionist, was being held captive by the South. His mission to run the blockade and trade weapons for raw cotton gets amended to include rescuing her dad. If they can do that, they have to get past the blockade again, but this time they'll be fired on by both sides. But their new steam engines are the fastest on the ocean...

So--a good story, good action, good characters, with an interesting treatment of a big moral question. I found 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea super dull, and I had expected to like it. Around the World in 80 Days was the opposite--I really liked it, and thought I wouldn't. I didn't have any idea about this, but enjoyed it. The takeaway is that I'm finding Verne's action stories more fun than his science fiction. But we'll test this theory when I read From the Earth to the Moon. Hope it's good; let's find out.

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