A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (James DeMille)

This book is mandatory reading for the Early Canadian Lit. course I'm taking this spring. I wasn't sure what to think about it when I first began reading. My immediate reaction a few chapters in was to say, "this is so Jules Verne." It also reminded me a bit of Gulliver's Travels and perhaps a little bit of the The Swiss Family Robinson.

The plot is two-layered. A small group of men of leisure, while sailing through the South Pacific pull a copper cylinder from water and find within it a manuscript written on papyrus. They proceed to spend the remainder of the book reading the manuscript aloud and commenting on it (not an unusual formula for 19th century novels). It is through this method that we the reader hear the story of Adam More, who became lost in a snow storm in a years earlier and was sucked into an opening of some sort within the south pole that carried him into another world with strange landscapes, strange people, and strange, dangerous customs.

The plot is nothing extraordinary and at times I found myself suspending my disbelief, not in the creates presented, but in the actions of Adam More. Not once does he discuss his life prior to the story and not once does he long for family or friends he left behind.

What took the novel to another level, away from sensational popular fiction, is the intense amount of philosophy as well as social and political commentary that the author, James DeMillie, has manged to weave into it. At times there seems to be a satirical battle between the validity of the capitalist and communist life-style. This pleased me. I'm automatically more interested in any book which I can relate political ideologies to.

I had no idea Canadian writing of the 19th century could be like this. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder is a refreshing change from the settler focused and rural settings of much of the Canadian literature written around the same time period.