Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Weird rich guy bets heavily on traveling around the world in eighty days and almost gets arrested. This classic novel by Jules Verne was first published in 1872, and at the time, going around the globe in under three months was considered a huge challenge, especially since trains and ships weren’t exactly punctual.
The novel follows Phileas Fogg, a mysterious wealthy man living in London and frequenting the ‘Reform Club’, where he usually spends most of his day. One day, when a newspaper claims it’s now possible to travel around the world in eighty days, Fogg makes a wager with his club members that he can prove it. His friends are confident it’s not possible, so they readily place a bet for a staggering 20,000 pounds, which as of 2026, would amount to almost 3 million pounds.
Phileas Fogg immediately sets off on his adventure to go around the world in eighty days, and he is accompanied on the absurd adventure by his new valet, Jean Passepartout (a personal attendant or a ‘servant’), a young Frenchman. From Egypt and India to Japan and America, the two of them find themselves on trains, steamers, boats, and even an elephant to make the impossible journey. And in a little twist, someone from the British police is on their trail, because he believes Phileas to be a primary suspect in a major case.
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Racist bits aside (it’s the 1870s, so Fogg has a typical imperialistic superiority complex), this remains a pretty fun and easy-to-read novel. But Phileas Fogg is frankly quite boring. He is so focused on getting back to London in 80 days that he never explores any place, even when he has a few hours to spare before catching the next steamer or train. It’s only through strokes of luck or misfortune that exciting things happen to Phileas and Passepartout. For instance, Passepartout gets into huge trouble in Bombay when he visits a temple and unwittingly offends the local priests because he isn’t aware that one must be barefoot in such places of worship, and wearing footwear is considered serious sacrilege.
Stylistically too, ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ is rich in description, despite its principal protagonist, Phileas Fogg, being a rather uptight Englishman, a man of very few words. And even though this is exactly the kind of work where an author could’ve stuffed pages and pages of descriptions, Jules Verne never bores or tires the reader with flowery descriptions or complex metaphors. I recently read Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, published a couple of decades after ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’, and found the language and writing style so fragmented and difficult to follow that it made me question my own grasp of the English language for a few seconds.
Much of the entertainment in the novel is provided by Passepartout, who is thrust into this crazy ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ tour by a master he has barely known for a day. At first, he is convinced Fogg’s is perhaps insane, but as the men spend more time together, Passepartout becomes more confident in Fogg’s strength of character. Their master-servant relationship undergoes a memorable transformation over the course of the novel.
The author maintains tight suspense through constant disruptions in the plot, keeping you turning the pages until the end. Of course, the climax is exactly what it should be: definitive, satisfying, and a reminder of why the novel remains a classic more than 150 years later. My biggest complaint is that Jules Verne barely allows his characters to actually explore the world. So if you’re expecting to travel around the globe with them and get a real taste of local cultures, food and clothing along the way, you’ll find surprisingly little of that here.
Rating for Around the World in Eighty Days: 4 stars on 5.
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