January 26, 1997

Back to the Future Julian Barnes's most recent book is ''Cross Channel.''

By JULIAN BARNES

Discovered eight years ago, Jules Verne's novel imagines what Paris will be like circa 1960

In the satirical revue ''Beyond the Fringe,'' a group of devout end-of-the-worlders (Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, Dudley Moore) are squatting on a mountaintop in sure expectation of a mighty wind and the thrilling punishment of the nondevout. They check their supplies of tinned food, then joyfully count down the seconds to the wonderful catastrophe. Nothing happens. A moment of understandable flatness follows, which is dispelled by their leader (Peter Cook) with the cheery punch line, ''Never mind, lads -- same time tomorrow -- we must get a winner soon.''

We are endlessly indulgent of prophets and prognosticators, astrologers and nostradami. They must, after all, know something. They can't be completely wrong, can they? So even perfectly intelligent people scan horoscopes; millennial journalists will be churning out their posh versions of palmistry for the next three years; while writers have been producing literary utopias and dystopias since the first hot chicken entrails were pulled. And when such seers get it all wrong, our indulgence remains unflagging: ''Mme. Sosostris only said it might be death by water.''

Most predictions tell us less about the future than about the time at which the prediction was made. ''Nineteen Eighty-four'' is a surer guide to 1948, when Orwell was writing his novel, than to his dated hell. Naturally, someone at Random House believes that Jules Verne's ''Paris in the Twentieth Century,'' now in a translation by Richard Howard, is ''an astonishingly prescient view into the future.'' We could hardly expect them to bill it as ''a fairly interesting view into the past.''

Verne wrote it in 1863, after ''Five Weeks in a Balloon'' had turned him from a jobbing writer into a hot long-seller. His publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, had helped shape that first hit, and was currently busy altering the end of Verne's second novel, ''The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.'' Hetzel was even more editorially creative with this third novel: he refused to publish it altogether. ''It's a washout, a fiasco,'' he told the novelist, ''and if a hundred thousand people told me the contrary I'd send them all to the devil.'' So a compliant author yielded to an interventionist editor who knew exactly what product he required. Hetzel, like a modern studio boss, wanted another boys-with-toys adventure rather than this bleak prophecy of life in the capital circa 1960. The manuscript was then lost until 1989, which gives our belated reading of it a rare double focus: we can look back not just at the time when Verne was writing but also at the time by which his predictions were meant to have come true.

Verne foresaw a bureaucratized, inert, technologically efficient and passively oppressive state in which only three professions remained: those of financier, businessman and industrialist. Science and moneymaking rule, the arts are despised and Victor Hugo is forgotten. Verne's poet-hero, Michel, is an idealist and outcast who, in a stiff and coincidence-ridden plot, experiences the soulless nightmare of contemporary life, finds a few like-minded chums, loves an angelic girl, loses his job and expires in the snow while looking down over the monstrous and dehumanized city.

The chief interest for us now is in what Verne gets right and what he gets wrong about the century we are poised to discard. Naturally, we are indulgent at first: look, here are gas-powered cars, spun-metal clothes, the Metro and criminals being electrocuted; plus versions of the elevator, wind power, the computer and the fax. This is superficially impressive, yet local to the world of science and technology that fascinated Verne. When he tries for anything broader, he is hopelessly, ridiculously wrong. His notion that the arts might wither away (in France?) we might leniently dismiss as more a fear than a prediction; ditto his notion of the British -- a frequent bugbear of Verne's -- buying up whole departments of France. More seriously, Verne proposes a France in which the practices of medicine and the law have died out, since people no longer get ill or disputatious. With even less understanding of his compatriots, he imagines that they will have given up politics: ''But who bothers with politics now? Foreign policy? No, war is no longer possible, and diplomacy is old-fashioned! Domestics policy? Dead calm!'' War is ''no longer possible'' because armies have long since been disbanded across Europe. He expressed this pacific forecast seven years before the Franco-Prussian War.

When it comes to the personal life, Verne is less obviously at sea because rethinking human, as opposed to scientific, matter is largely beyond him. His characters behave in 1960 as if members of a very conventional mid-19th-century novel. There is even a husband bringing ''adultery charges'' against his wife: tell that to the St.-Germain of Sartre and de Beauvoir. As for the defining conflict of the novel, between a dreamy impractical artist and his oppressive, materialistic uncle - the mechanical man, the ultimate utilitarian - what could be more 1860's?, rathar than 1960's?

If ''Paris in the Twentieth Century'' is atypical of Verne's output, it is still helpful in pointing up why he is and isn't read nowadays. He was a consummate techno-nerd: all his available literary verve goes into describing the clever simplicities of the Metro system, or an advanced burglar-catching device; human beings are there principally to spout ideas and explain how things work. There remains, of course, a surviving literary tradition in which boys have adventures and celebrate their toys, and their readership still reveres Verne. But all toys date quickly. In 1902 the novelist Jules Renard was noting in his ''Journal'' that his son Fantec ''was of a generation which which no longer loves Jules Verne, and which is no longer astonished by the Nautilus, no doubt because it has seen the submarine. Fantec himself outdoes Verne, inventing every week a new bicycle or a new aviator.'' Nowadays, Fantec might have more doubts about the benignity of science; he would prefer his thrilling tales and technical hardware to be shown in cinematic form; if he read, it might be Michael Crichton.

Verne thought his own life uninteresting - a judgment Herbert R. Lottman's pedestrian turb. (Perhaps he works best with newer material, as in his ''Albert Camus.'') It is liveliest on Verne's relations with Hetzel. If the novelist knew pretty well what he was good at, the publisher knew even better. For him, marketing was part of editorial. He cut and changed Verne's manuscripts, frequently without consultation, and inserted ''pious touches'' that would make the targeted readership purr. His most famous interference was over the character of Captain NHemo. Verne wrote him as a Pole who roamed the seas taking revenge on Russia for having ravaged his native land. Hetzel vetoed this: Russia was a friend of France, and his magazine had Russian readers. So Nemo lost both his nationality and any comprehensible motive for his subaqueous wrath.

Verne colluded in this, if protestingly. At the same time, he thought he should be elected to the Academie Francaise. In this he was the true forerunner of today's popular novelists who write successfully for the market and then imagine that the lack of literary respect accorded them springs from envy. The fact that the Academie was also regularly rebussing Zola didn't comfort Verne. As he grew older, his literary prognostications grew gloomier: interviewed by The Pittsburgh Gazette in 1902, he declared that the novel was effectively dead. Even the fantastical, in which he had specialized, was on the way out; in 50 or a hundred years, people would read only newspapers. Wrong again; but he might have been cheered by V.S. Naipaul's recent endorsement of fiction's imminent moribundity. As Peter Cook put it, ''We must get a winner soon.''

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/01/26/reviews/970126.26barnest.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

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