Book Review: Blockade Runners – Jules Verne

The Blockade Runners, is from the father of Science fiction. It comes across as an escape from the usual writing of the time. We are able to learn so much about his writing that we can use today.

The book starts off with a lengthy scene setting, which is very common for the era. If you do want to read books from a different century, and I highly recommend doing so, be patient with the writing style. The writing style was all about painting a very deep picture of the world and the people involved before getting into the story.

The book is compelling in the way that what he writes makes you want to keep reading so that you find out what he is talking about, he spends a whole chapter talking about a ship that is being created. I spent the whole chapter wondering what was so special about the ship, only to find that it had two corkscrews rather than the conventional one. It may not seem like a major change to the design of ships now, but then it made the ship fast enough to evade anything on the open sea.

The point, as far as writers are concerned, is the things we can learn about the writing style to include or avoid in our own books. The thing to be careful with is the changing of the point of view. Jules Verne jumped from point of view to point of view often enough to make omniscient narrator a real thing.  The book itself is not written from any particular point of view, but the narration of the story can be a little dizzying.

Jules Verne characters were well thought out and the motives that drove the characters were clear to the narrator and made an excellent story. I would have loved a little more character development from some of the other characters but the development from the main character the captain of the Dolphin was quite believable. I felt a little sorry for the captain as his views were very much shaken and the easy journey he had planned became quite a complicated one.

5/5