This post will contain a spoiler for the classic Jules Verne novel “The Mysterious Island.” In some ways, it’s such common knowledge that it’s not truly a spoiler, which as you will see is part of the point of my post. Anyway, if you plan to read the novel any time soon, I don’t want to be accused of ruining it for you, so just move along.

When I downloaded “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea,” as explained here, I only meant to test out the Kindle reading app on my smartphone. I figured that, once I had seen how that app worked, I would set the novel aside, and finish it once I got my actual Kindle.

But I have such fond memories of the novel from my childhood that once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop. The free public-domain Kindle version uses the oldest English translation, which is in some places inaccurate and which supposedly cuts out some material; one of these days I’ll spend the money to buy one of the more recent translations, which are supposed to be far superior. But I still loved the novel, and I could not stop reading it, even on my little smartphone screen.

Anyway, while biding my time until this weekend (when my tax refund will arrive and I will be able to order a Kindle), I decided to downolad a second public-domain Jules Verne novel, “The Mysterious Island.” The current movie “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” a sequel to 2009′s “Journey To The Center of the Earth,” is not a straight adaptation but rather a modern-day “inspired by” twist on the story, including, as far as I can tell, some meta references to the novel.

Anyway — and here’s the spoiler — the reason I decided to download “The Mysterious Island” is because it continues the story of Captain Nemo from “Twenty Thousand Leagues.” I thought that was widely known; I’d certainly seen references to it, well, everywhere.

But it turns out that Nemo doesn’t show up until the last 10 percent of the book (thank you, Kindle progress indicator!), and his identity is clearly meant to be a surprise. I sort of wish I hadn’t known ahead of time he was going to show up — but then again, if I hadn’t known it, I wouldn’t have read the novel in the first place.

I have to say, “The Mysterious Island” is inferior to “Twenty Thousand Leagues” in almost every way. “Twenty Thousand Leagues” has four sharply-drawn and memorable characters, and although Verne has a little bit of florid description, for the most part we learn about them by the way they speak and act.

“The Mysterious Island,” on the other hand, is full of Verne telling us — and having the characters tell each other — what great, heroic, amazing fellows they all are. Don’t get me wrong; I like heroes. I like larger-than-life characters. I think we need more of them. But Verne spends more time telling us what a remarkable and amazing fellow Cyrus Harding* is than he does letting Harding be remarkable or amazing. Verne also overpraises Harding’s supporting cast, even though they sometimes give the impression that they wouldn’t know how to boil water without Harding to guide them. Even the dog, Top, is praised as having intelligence and loyalty worthy of Lassie — which would be fine if this were a story about Top, but in this case it’s just excess upon excess. When you have five superhuman characters, a superhuman dog, a superhuman orangutan, and a pirate who goes through a superhuman process of remorse and redemption, and they’re the only characters for two-thirds of the book, it becomes a bit much. And when antagonists finally show up, they’re pretty much faceless non-entities, shooting at our heroes from a distance. That’s not larger-than-life, it’s over-the-top.

The five main characters, plus the dog, are marooned on an island in the South Pacific. Shipwrecked, you assume? Why, no. They use a balloon to escape from a Confederate prison in Richmond, Va., and are blown by a storm southwest across North America and into the most remote region of the South Pacific.

They set about using their superhuman skills to make their island paradise so comfortable that they have no real intention of leaving, except perhaps to go and retrieve their families and bring them back. This takes away the primary challenge and motivation for a castaway story. (In all their chattering about how much they love their island home, they never once mention the absence of the opposite sex, which makes you wonder.)

There’s also a queasy situation as regards race relations. Reading novels from an earlier era is always a balancing act; you have to take them as documents of their own time. But sometimes, the treatment of race or gender becomes so intrusive that it impacts your enjoyment of the novel.

In “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea,” two of the main characters are Prof. Aronnax and his manservant Conseil. Conseil’s unswerving, completely selfless devotion to Prof. Aronnax, to the point of casting himself overboard at one point after Aronnax falls overboard, sounds a little bit, well, unhealthy to our modern sensibilities, but you’re able to set it aside for the most part. It’s certainly not the only such relationship in classic literature.

Well, there’s a similar master-servant relationship in “The Mysterious Island,” and in this case it’s between Cyrus Harding, late of the Union Army in the Civil War, and Nebuchadnezzar, or “Neb,” as he’s known, a former slave freed by Harding. Neb has the same sort of devotion to Harding that Conseil has to Aronnax, but given Neb’s past, and Harding’s devotion to the Union cause, it seems just bizarre. Neb even refers to Harding as “my master,” at least in the English translation I read, and it gave me the willies. (Perhaps the original French approached the relationship with more subtlety.)

The book is not without its charms, don’t get me wrong, and there are parts of it I enjoyed. But it’s nowhere near the classic story of “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea.”

*According to Wikipedia, Cyrus’ last name is Smith instead of Harding in some translations. I like the name “Cyrus Harding” better, however, and that’s what was used in the Kindle translation.