Overview

Professor Lidenbrock has found a runic cryptogram inside a sixteenth-century Icelandic manuscript, and he is certain - with the total, imperious certainty that characterizes everything about him - that it describes a route to the center of the Earth. His nephew Axel is less certain. Axel is, in fact, terrified. But the professor is not the sort of man whose expeditions are optional for the people who live with him, and so in the summer of 1863, three men descend into the crater of Snæfellsjökull, a glacier-capped volcano on the western coast of Iceland, and begin one of the most extraordinary journeys in literature. Jules Verne published Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, as one of the opening installments of his Voyages extraordinaires - the series of novels he would spend the next forty years producing, each one designed to render, in the form of adventure fiction, the geographical and scientific knowledge of his era. This novel is where the method is most purely itself: the descent through volcanic tunnels, across a vast subterranean sea, past forests of prehistoric vegetation and creatures from the Mesozoic still alive in the Earth's interior, is rooted at every point in the genuine scientific debates of the 1860s - about the temperature of the Earth's core, about the evidence of paleontology, about the boundaries of what exploration might find. What makes it endure, beyond the science and the adventure, are the three men making the journey: the magnificent, unstoppable Lidenbrock; his nephew Axel, whose terror is the reader's and whose gradual courage is the story's emotional arc; and Hans, their Icelandic guide, who performs every impossible service with unhurried competence and collects his wages on time. One of the great adventure novels of the nineteenth century - and still, after more than a hundred and fifty years, impossible to put down.

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