The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

25,000 feet under the sea

The Maracot Deep is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final novel. It was first published in book form in 1929; he died the following year. The novel was previously published in serial form in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post (1927) and The Strand Magazine (1927-1928). The Maracot Deep is a science fiction novel of undersea exploration. The work will spark obvious comparisons to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but it really has more in common with Conan Doyle’s own 1912 novel The Lost World.

Esteemed British oceanographer and marine biologist Dr. Maracot organizes an expedition to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He takes along two companions: zoologist Cyrus Headley, who serves as the narrator for most of the book, and Bill Scanlan, an American mechanic who serves much the same purpose as Verne’s Ned Land of Twenty Thousand Leagues. The team are lowered to the ocean floor in a vehicle similar to a bathysphere, except that this submersible is box-shaped, like an elevator. They descend five miles down into the deepest trench in the Atlantic, named the Maracot Deep in honor of the professor. The lifeline to their surface vessel is cut, leaving them stranded at the bottom of the trench with impending death a foregone conclusion. They are miraculously saved, however, by a race of undersea dwellers who prove to be the descendants of the centuries-old sunken civilization of Atlantis. 

While Verne was more interested in actual oceanographic science, here Conan Doyle is more interested in fantasy. In order for his crew to have even the slightest chance of surviving, Conan Doyle conveniently dispenses with the intense pressure exerted by great depths of water. He just invents a theory to eliminate that obstacle. One commendable choice, however, is that these Atlanteans are not able to breathe in water like fish. Instead, they have created technology to master their environment, including a breathing apparatus that would put modern scuba gear to shame. At the bottom of the ocean, Maracot and company encounter all manner of sea serpents and lethal beasts that are more mythical than scientifically authentic. Regrettably, the reader only learns the bare basics about Atlantis and its inhabitants because as soon as the three heroes make it to the ancient sunken city, they’ve already started looking for an escape from their hosts.

Even as late as 1927, Conan Doyle is unwilling to allow for a disembodied third-person narration or an interior first-person perspective. Instead, he sticks with the Victorian convention that all stories must be told in the concrete form of a written document, such as a diary, a letter, or a message in a bottle. This makes for some clunky logistics in the telling of this story, such as unnecessary multiple perspectives and a jumbled chronology. The novel proper basically ends with chapter five, but Conan Doyle must have had a seven-issue contract with the Strand, because he tacks on two chapters at the end that really should have been integrated into the main narrative rather than presented as afterthoughts. Conan Doyle’s most egregious sin with this novel, however, is that he can’t find enough sci-fi potential in undersea exploration, so he resorts to throwing in some of his usual supernatural spiritualist mumbo jumbo.

I don’t believe Conan Doyle wrote The Maracot Deep to compete with or capitalize on Verne’s masterpiece. Rather, I think he simply wanted to try his hand at one of the few subgenres of adventure literature—undersea exploration—that he hadn’t yet covered. The Maracot Deep really doesn’t hold a candle to Twenty Thousand Leagues, and it reveals Conan Doyle to be past his prime at this point. There just isn’t enough science in this watered-down science fiction.

Footsteps of Fate by Louis Couperus

Dutch treat

Louis Couperus (1863-1923) was a Dutch novelist and poet who enjoyed some international success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His novel Footsteps of Fate (Dutch title: Noodlot) was published in 1890. According to literary critic Edmund Gosse, who wrote the introduction to the first English translation of the novel, Couperus was a member of the Dutch Sensitivists school (a term I’ve never seen anywhere else, so maybe Gosse invented it). As far as I can tell from Gosse, this sounds like a literary school that was inspired by French Naturalism but didn’t want to admit that it was inspired by French Naturalism. Judging by Footsteps of Fate, Couperus writes in accord with the same philosophy of fatalism and heredity as the Naturalists, as exemplified by the novels of Emile Zola, but he stops short of the more blatantly coarse, vulgar, and offensive scenes and subject matter in the writings of Zola or even Balzac. The Sensitivists were also admirers of Joris-Karl Huysmans, a Zola protégé of Dutch ancestry.

Frank Westhove is a Dutch expatriate living in London. There are a few brief mentions of his background as an engineer, but at the time the story opens he seems to be living the life of an independently wealthy English gentleman, i.e. not working at all. One cold winter night he is approached by a shabby vagrant who turns out to be an old chum of his, Bertie van Maeren. Bertie had been to America, experienced some career failures and hard times, and was now homeless and almost penniless. He asks Frank for some assistance, and with a generous what-are-friends-for attitude, Frank invites Bertie into his home and promises to support him financially until he can get back on his feet. This turns into an extended roommate situation in which Frank and Bertie live the lives of well-to-do gentleman, financed entirely by Frank, who doesn’t seem to mind one bit. While the two are off on a trip to Norway, they meet some fellow Londoners, Sir Archibald Rhodes and his daughter Eva. The travelers get to know one another, and Frank, not surprisingly, falls in love with Eva. Rather than being happy for his friend, this relationship brings out the worst in Bertie, who fears that a union between Frank and Eva will rob him of his meal ticket and put him back out on the streets. 

One doesn’t learn much about Dutch life or literature from Footsteps of Fate. It reads very much like an English novel of the Victorian Era. It has a gentility about it that one doesn’t often find in the works of Naturalist literature, but nevertheless the fundamental elements of Naturalism are present: the faithfulness to realism and the assertion that much of mankind’s behavior is molded by social and hereditary forces and therefore out of one’s control. Some aspects of the story come across as unrealistic—most notably Frank’s limitless generosity and Eva’s exaggerated frailties—but one must keep in mind that what seems realistic in the 21st century differs from what would have seemed realistic to the Victorian readers of 1890. Bertie, however, rings true as a timeless archetypal example of the mooching houseguest. Footsteps of Fate starts out in a deceptively decorous and sober manner, but to Couperus’s credit, the book snowballs surprisingly into full-on unsparing Naturalism. Couperus fools you into a false sense of comfort and complacency before hitting you with the hard stuff towards the end.

I’m a fan of Naturalist literature in the vein of Zola or Frank Norris. This was my first experience with Couperus, and I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The characters are memorable, the situations believable, and the plot served up its fair share of surprises. I will definitely seek out more of Couperus’s novels in the future.

The Personal Equation by Eugene O‘Neill

The Hairy Ape lite

Eugene O’Neill

After having read several of Eugene O’Neill’s better-known plays, I became a fan of his writing and decided to set about reading his complete works. Doing so has led me to some rather obscure works of his, some unjustly obscure and some deservedly so. The Personal Equation, one such O’Neill rarity, falls somewhere between the two. Written in 1915 as a class project when O’Neill was at Harvard, The Personal Equation didn’t make it to the stage until over a century later, when the Provincetown Players performed the work in 2019. O’Neill himself wished for many of his earlier plays to remain forgotten, because they weren’t up to his later high standards, but The Personal Equation is certainly not the worst of his early efforts (the worst would likely be Welded, with Bread and Butter and Servitude close behind). Nevertheless, when O’Neill won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, it is unlikely that The Personal Equation factored into that decision.

The fact that The Personal Equation is an issue-driven play makes it more interesting than the romances and relationship dramas from O’Neill’s early career. This play deals with labor issues of the World War I era, which if nothing else lends some historical value to the drama. Tom Perkins is a member of the IWE—International Workers of the Earth—a thinly veiled surrogate for the real-life IWW—Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies). While working clandestinely as a labor organizer and agitator, Tom has a day job working in the offices of the Ocean Steamship Company. He associates with a cell of other IWE activists, including his girlfriend Olga, with whom he cohabitates, a rather daring and progressive arrangement for an unmarried couple in those days. The IWE charges Tom with a dangerous mission to blow up the engines of the Ocean Steamship Company’s ship the SS San Francisco, in hopes that the action will inspire shipworkers to revolt in a general strike. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Tom’s father, Thomas Perkins Sr., is the second engineer on that very same SS San Francisco and a loyal company man who loves his job, his ship, and his engines. Regardless, to prove his loyalty to the IWE, Tom accepts the sabotage mission.

Early in his adult life, O’Neill worked for several years on merchant marine vessels and joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the IWW. The platform of the IWW was a mix of socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist principles. In The Personal Equation, O’Neill deliberately distances the fictional IWE from the “Socialists,” presumably meaning the Socialist Party of America. Though O’Neill may have been a member of the IWW, his depiction of the IWE in this play is not entirely positive. One gathers that he believed in the party line of the IWW, but he was disappointed with the management of the organization and its ineffectiveness in living up to its ideals. He also criticizes how the IWW and other leftist radicals abandoned their antiwar stance in the face of World War I jingoism.

Much of the first half of The Personal Equation is predictable, but the ending is rather cleverly unexpected. The premise of the play sets up some contrived scenes, particularly the father vs. son conflict, but if you think of this as political symbolism and don’t expect too much realism, one can appreciate the care and craft with which O’Neill constructed this drama to convey his intended message. Ultimately, however, The Personal Equation ends up feeling like a watered-down rough sketch for O’Neill’s later, greater, and much more powerful allegory of labor unrest and class struggle, The Hairy Ape. Still, if you are a fan of O’Neill’s work, and The Hairy Ape in particular, then The Personal Equation is a well-drawn rough sketch that’s worth a look.