The summary on Goodreads:
A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read.
Gulliver’s Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver’s final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire – in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans.
I think Gulliver’s Travels is such a strange book, definitely not a children’s book as I had thought. There are very many editions of this book. The edition I read is the e-book edition based on the text of Swift’s 1726 original, with the 1899 illustrations of Arthur Rackham. It’s a satire on human nature and the imaginary travellers’ tale literary subgenre about Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon who travels to four strange and distant lands.
This is one of those books that I’ve known of since childhood and have known bits of the story, but have never read. I did see a TV cartoon version several years ago and I’ve been meaning to read it for years. It’s a book, which operates on several levels, as the Introduction in one of my copies (an Odhams Press Limited publication) states:
An embittered, middle-aged man sat down to write a book that would scourge the vices and follies of mankind. That book, with its sting mellowed during the passage of two hundred years, has become – of all things – a children’s classic. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ was the splenetic outburst of a passionate mind, whose genius gave immortality to so transient a thing as satire; but that immortality had a permanent basis – a child-like delight in marvels, a freshness of invention, a limpid style and a selective perception that created images of giants, dwarfs and fabled races with a vivid pulsating life of their own.
I don’t think I’d have liked it very much if I’d read it as a child as there are many passages that would have bored me stiff and which even now I found tedious and heavy going in parts. It satirises the political situation during Swift’s lifetime, and is full of political and social allusions, a lot of which, interesting as it is, passed over my head.
But it is a fantastical fantasy set in such different places, the ones I found most interesting are Lilliput inhabited by tiny people Brobdignag, the land of giants, and the country of the Houyhnhms, where a race of talking horses, rule the Yahoos, strange, filthy humanoid animals that Gulliver viewed with contempt and disgust. Gulliver became a part of one of the horse’s households and grew to admire and wanted to emulate the Houyhnhms’ way of life, which left him horrified with humanity. Less interesting is his visit to Laputa, a flying island and it’s rebellious cities.
It was not really what I expected, and whilst I think a lot of it is absurd and amusing, it’s certainly not a book I can say that I enjoyed, I think it was worth reading and I’m glad I finally got round to reading it.
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