Five men and a dog steal a hot air balloon during a stormy night to escape the confederate army that besieged the town of Richmond (Virginia). The storm rapidly turns into a hurricane and brings the miserable runaways 12,000 kilometers away from Virginia (Atlantic coast) to the South Pacific Ocean. Castaway on an uninhabited land, the five unfortunate men have the good fortune of having skills that complement each other so well that no obstacles can prevent them from achieving their goals. However, among these five men, none is more valuable than Cyrus Smith who, in his quality of engineer, becomes the group's undisputed leader quickly turning into some kind of living god in his comrades' eyes as Cyrus Smith is capable of taming this island lost in the Pacific Ocean that can become a real cornucopia to whom would colonize it, shape it and industrialize it.
Through The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne created a story that aimed at criticizing Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe (published in 1719). It seems that Jules Verne couldn't believe that a man isolated from a so-called "civilized" society could go back to a state of nature after finding himself alone on an island for years. This is why Jules Verne decided to craft a story in which five American castaways found themselves grounded in the South Pacific for decades without losing their humanity which, in the end, led The Mysterious Island to become a hollow story in many aspects (these five men never thought about the people and/or things they left behind: their family, their friends, their job, etc. Another strange fact was that no conflicts ever emerged between the castaways throughout all these years spent on this island, etc.). And this is where the difference truly lies between Verne and Defoe. The characters created by Jules Verne are so perfect that no challenges could make them doubt or fail and, in the end, there was no emotions, no humanity that exuded from Cyrus Smith, Pencroff, and Harbert and Spilett as well as Neb (though for a different reason. Neb was a former slave, and Verne, a pro-colonialist from Nantes, a city that enriched itself through slave trade, dehumanized Neb based on his skin colour.). For 800 pages I suffered from boredom due to the lack of style, the lack of rhythm, and the clear nonexistence of mystery on this island and the absence of character evolution as well as Verne's refusal to give a distinct voice to each one of his characters.
Instead of writing a complex novel, Jules Verne composed a simplistic story whose sole purpose was to show the "superiority" of Mankind against Nature and the "benefits" of colonialism as well as his naive and idealist vision of American democracy.
The only positive thing I am willing to give to Verne's novel is the importance that scientific knowledge played in The Mysterious Island. Other than that, I did not enjoy reading this book at all and would not recommend it.
Verne, J., L'Île Mystérieuse, Paris, Librairie Générale Française, 2002.