Book Review: The Maracot Deep

 

© 1928 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 

This was exactly what I was looking for back in the cold, uncertain weeks this past January. There, on the dusky shelves of ye old book shoppe, it stood, untouched by human hands in years – The Maracot Deep, slim, yellowed, gnarled. The perfect cure to what was ailing me back then, only in the whirlwind of The Move to Texas I did not get to crack it until three weeks back.

This is exactly the type of book I would have bought from the Bookmobile, that 70s thing that would drive up to our elementary school every spring, where we’d enter in groups of two or three to peruse the selections. Did I buy Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes? Think so. One of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian paperbacks? Probably. Anything from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Not sure, but this was the type of stuff that was big with me way back then.

So it promised nostalgia and a quick read. And it provided both.

The story’s fairly simple and straightforward. Professor Maracot, famous Renaissance man of science in the late 1800s, along with his protégé Mr. Cyrus Headley and everyman Bill Scanlon, plan to plumb the depths of the bottomless seas while on a transatlantic voyage of exploration. Actually, to descend to about two or three miles if I remember correctly. Best of all, the bathysphere that he plans to do it in is completely decked out as any Victorian sitting room den laboratory combination would be. I absolutely loved that visual. All that was needed would be Peter Cushing as the Professor and Christopher Lee as Headley. I even envision this as a Hammer flick on the ABC 4:30 movie back in the day.

Along the bottom, at the edge of an abyss, the team encounters a tremendous crustacean monstrosity which severs their tether and air lines to the surface vessel, and the bathysphere plummets over the edge to the darkness below. Stoically facing their deaths, Maracot intends to continue his observations until the air will run out in a day or so.

Crashed on the ocean floor, in a dark lit up only by eerie planktonic fluorescence, at the edge of death – a face at the porthole! And so the Atlanteans are introduced. The three men are rescued, introduced into the society of Atlantis, the sunken world from Plato’s antiquity, and are set to marvel at the wonders of this undersea utopia – television-like devices that translate thoughts into images to make communication easier, translucent body-hugging deep sea diving apparatuses, negative-buoyant glass spheres, which our heroes use covertly to send messages to the surface.

Recently I was looking at some blog posts here from ten years back and came across an entry to the effect that I never liked the Victorian adventure novel. I am not sure why I wrote that. I understand memory is quite malleable, and over the life of this blog I’ve read stuff that has opened my eyes. But those bookmobile memories are certain, and if I also remember my science fiction movie regimen with any accuracy, I’ve always loved the Victorian man of science as well as the Victorian Man of Science adventures stories. And the main ingredient of such stories is an eccentric, brilliant scientist accompanied by his protégé and a blue collar man for the hard labor.

No women allowed. Except, perhaps, as a one-dimensional love interest. That box is checked off here in The Maracot Deep.

Despite the unbelievable aspects of the story – the Atlantean society as a whole wholly improbable, as well as the denouement of a battle of wits with … the devil! – I kinda enjoyed the story. Maybe it was the quickness of the read. Maybe it was the bookmobile or the ABC 4:30 movie nostalgia. But I’d definitely read more of Sir Arthur, particularly his Professor Challenger novels, and I’ll put them on the Acquisitions List in case I stumble upon them in those dusky shelves of the various ye old book shoppes I peruse.

Grade: B+

 

Oh – WARNING! The book, and the man who wrote it, is a product of its time. As is anyone who permanently resides in the vaults of history. They should be judged on their merits in their time, and not by our morality or what passes for faddish morality. The case in point in The Maracot Deep is the word that shall never be spoken is indeed spoken by a character. And I must confess I found it shocking. Do I wish to cancel Sir Arthur? Not a chance. I don’t play those games. But I felt it needed to be pointed out. There are two other minor instances of a character using dated slang for people of the Chinese persuasion. But that was it. A product of its time.