In a 1959 episode of The Twilight Zone, a bookworm (Burgess Meredith) survives a nuclear apocalypse and glories in the fact that he finally has uninterrupted time to read.

A cruel twist ending helped the episode make an impression, but it also dramatized a particular brand of fantasy: the idea that one might retain the means of intellectual exploration while having all social obligations stripped away by forces beyond one’s control. A new audiobook production of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Blackstone Publishing) highlights the way in which Jules Verne dramatized this fantasy a century earlier.

In Aria Mia Loberti’s performance, Captain Nemo is not a mysterious genius over whom one might obsess. He comes across as almost comically stuffy, even a little constipated. The harpooner Ned Land is tamped down as well, in contrast to the two characters whose shared sense of awe emerges as the novel’s animating quality: narrator Pierre Arronax and his faithful servant Conseil.

Loberti, a newcomer who was cast as lead of the Netflix series All the Light We Cannot See (2023), is one of few women ever enlisted to narrate a professional recording of Verne’s novel, originally published in serial installments from 1869-70. Passages from Twenty Thousand Leagues figure in All the Light, based on a 2014 novel by Anthony Doerr.

The actor has said she “tried not to think about portrayals of masculinity” while voicing the story’s all-male cast of characters. That’s just as well. Though gendered expectations form a backdrop for all the characters’ pursuits, sexually they’re neuter. Verne evinces zero interest in the implications of extended submarine sequester for his lead characters and their deliberately ambiguous number of supporting mariners, beyond the matter of how they procure food and air.

(The characters’ de facto genderlessness is itself a marker of gender: imagine a publisher’s reaction, in Verne’s era, to a story about women characters that completely ignores any motivations they might have beyond exploration, vindication, and satiation.)

What the reader is left with, aside from the author’s inventive series of episodes threatening the characters’ continued existence, is a strong sense of curiosity rewarded. It’s that quality Loberti most powerfully evokes, inviting us to gaze out the saloon windows along with Captain Nemo’s passengers as The Nautilus voyages through undersea forests, erupting volcanos, and habitats teeming with fish of all descriptions.

A good number of the book’s 150,000 words are absorbed with details of the ship’s navigation and Arronax’s catalog of the marine life The Nautilus encounters. Despite a judicious abridgment, there’s still a fair amount of this material in the new audiobook, and Loberti’s great gift to the listener is to sweep us up into the wonder of it all. She doesn’t take a single detail for granted, convincing us that as Arronax avers, he is in no hurry to end his forced voyage.

It’s this aspect of the book that invites the Twilight Zone comparison. The listener is invited to consider the perfect joy of the French scientist (the audiobook follows the well-established American practice of using a British accent to convey any and all sorts of Western European background), supplied with a vast library and set out upon a voyage of undersea exploration with no choice but to go along. With Nemo playing the bad guy, Arronax gets a completely guilt-free pass to adventure.

Hopefully Loberti, who is legally blind and says she has long enjoyed audiobooks as a consumer, will be enlisted for future productions. For all the panache the narrator puts into Verne’s descriptions of natural phenomena, she particularly charms with small moments of character humor. For example, she reads Arronax’s excuse for fearing sharks with a droll and deliberate enjoyment that makes it hard for the listener not to smile.

Now, if you were invited to hunt the bear in the mountains of Switzerland, what would you say?

“Very well! to-morrow we will go and hunt the bear.” If you were asked to hunt the lion in the plains of Atlas, or the tiger in the Indian jungles, what would you say?

“Ha! ha! it seems we are going to hunt the tiger or the lion!” But when you are invited to hunt the shark in its natural element, you would perhaps reflect before accepting the invitation.

No need to reflect before accepting the invitation to retrace the voyage of The Nautilus with Loberti as your guide. Verne’s vastly influential story is as resonant as ever in its romantic portrayal of an escape from the world of land-dwellers who can’t be bothered to stop and smell the seaweed.

– Jay Gabler