Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift, 1726)

Having made several trips to the cinema over the last couple of months, I've seen the new Orange advert starring Jack Black in Gulliver's Travels far more often than I'd like to. (On a side note, what's happened to the Orange ad guys from old? They were much more entertaining that the movie placement versions). And while I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than watch Jack Black's 'comedy' schtick in the movie, it drew me to Jonathan Swift's novel, which has been sitting on my shelves for a good few years. Although not in the Classic Adventures series of books, it sits comfortably with the adventure stories of Verne and Stevenson. 

I'm willing to bet that the new movie version has not one tiny bit of the wit and critique of humanity that Swift delivers in what is really a series of 4 adventures experienced by Gulliver over several years in the early 18th century. Gulliver's first voyage ends with him shipwrecked on Lilliput with a population of tiny, inches high peoples who, in the iconic image associated with the story, pin him down with ropes. What is less well known about the story is how Gulliver goes on to learn the language of the Lilliputians, helps to capture the neighbouring island's navy and eventually falls from favour when he pisses on the king's castle to extinguish a fire! The latter is not the behaviour you'd expect from a classic, let alone other mentions of bodily functions. They crop up again on Gulliver's second adventure in Brobdingnag where the people are many feet tall and Gulliver is the tiny one, and he has to run out into the garden to relive himself. 

In Lilliput, Swift examines the way that countries go to war over trivialities, in this case over how high a heel on a shoe should be. In Laputa, a floating city visited in part 3, Gulliver finds a race concerned only with music and maths. In Glubbdubdrib, again in part 3 (where Gulliver visits several regions), our protagonist finds a people able to bring forth the spirits of any dead person in history, so Gulliver enjoys himself conversing with Roman leaders and Greek philosophers. In Luggnagg, he finds that some of the race are able to live forever, a prospect he finds fascinating, but soon learns that although the live forever, they don't stop aging, and find a fate worse than death. 

The first two voyages, to Lilliput and Brobdingnag follow a similar pattern and involve descriptions of each land and peoples and how they're different from Europeans, while part 3 of the book takes in several races who are 'regular' sized but have particular quirks such as immortality. Each part allows Gulliver/Swift to muse on certain aspects of European behaviour in contrast to the peoples he encounters. It's an interesting journey and, once I could get into the way Swift writes (with random commas and semi-colons gallore), I really enjoyed the trip. I found the book even more interesting in part 4, where Gulliver finds that horses, or Houyhnhnms, rule the land, and primitive, caveman-like humans/Yahoo are kept as pets or run wild. 

The Houyhnhnms are fascinated with Gulliver, a clothed, educated Yahoo, and Gulliver is equalled bemused with how the horses' society works. They have no word for or conception of lies, and they live in harmony. In the most blatantly critical essay on society in the tome, Gulliver discusses with his 'master' how humans live in a world of crooked politicians, scheming lawyers and general baseness. In the telling, Gulliver decides that he wants to stay in the idyllic world of the Houyhnhnms and shun the human race with all of their faults. He shows even less regard for his wife and children back home in Britain than earlier, when on escaping the other worlds and returning home, within months he's back on a boat.

More than just a series of adventures with unusual peoples, Gulliver's Travels is amusing, shocking and critical of 18th century society, and there is much more to Swift's work than a man tied down by little people. It's a book that made me think and I enjoyed it for many reasons. And even more than ever I will definitely be avoiding the new movie version.