Gulliver Travelled To FOUR Fantasy Lands So You Don’t Have To!
The first thing to say is that this is not the Jack Black film, the Gulliver in this story is not a husky American comedian. There is very little here that will resonate with fans of Kung Fu Panda.
Well no, the first thing to say is that this is a review of Gulliver’s Travels, a book by Jonathan Swift. It’s not a novel, to be clear; it said in the introduction that this book predates the novel as a literary medium by some years. And it fucking shows. This book reads much more like a dispassionate travel log than like any kind of story, so while there are technically spoilers in this review, you’re not missing out on any beautiful prosaic paragraphs or poetic eulogies of tiny people, so you can pretty much skip the book and just read this review. It was written in such an uninteresting style that I had to keep reminding myself that Gulliver wasn’t real and hadn’t written it himself, which I suppose is impressive in a way. There was personality imbued into the narration, but it was not a heroic adventurer personality or a lovable rogue or even a colonialist anti-hero. The vibe coming through the first-person perspective was that of a nerd who you’d really like to bully and every time he just barely makes his way out of a scrape you curse your luck that you have to keep reading his sermons that he gives to every new ruler of a far away land that he meets about how great Europe and England is. It’s seriously insane, four times in the book he will say some variant on the phrase “He asked me to tell him about the nation I hailed from. The weight of the task crushed me. I did my utmost but I could never do justice to the glory of England and the nobility of our King and ruler.” And then go on for a few pages explaining the intricacies of the 18th century British legal system.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The beginning of Gulliver’s Travels you may already have some kind of an idea of. It is the part where Gulliver, a doctor with a thirst for adventure, is hired to practice medicine on some kind of sea voyage, he’s excited, raring to go, and then almost immediately he shipwrecks and he finds himself on an island being tied down to the beach by two hundred tiny people the size of his little finger. First of all, how strong can those ropes be? You can’t seriously be telling me that if you were tied into the sand with thin string that you couldn’t just roll over and free yourself? But whatever, I’ll go along with it for the sake of the story. What I will not go along with is the way he really will NOT stop talking about how little the little people are. Everything he does he has to remind you “The people were as big as my little finger” or he will talk about their helmets and say “It was smaller than a thimble”. I get it dude, I have a little finger that is directly in my field of vision as I am reading this book, you can trust me to do the maths myself without having to say “The javelins were the size of toothpicks”. While Swift has a tendency to really labour a point, such as the small people being small, I must give him credit for covering a lot of aspects quite thoughtfully that would never have occurred to the reader. Such as how he got his gunpowder confiscated off him and he had to warn them not to let the pile (which was massive to them) near an open flame or the entire capital city would go up in flames. A similar incident does occur at some point later in the story, after he has made friends with the ruling class, wherein he notices a fire spreading to a wing of the emperor’s wife’s house and he very bashfully describes the way that, with no other alternative befitting a gentleman, he urinated on that wing to extinguish the flames. Anyone would think she would be thankful but actually she considered it a great insult and never used that wing again, chalk it up to cultural differences I suppose.
This was much less shocking to the sensitive reader than a passage that came earlier, a passage that came almost immediately when Gulliver had been taken in by the Lilliputians in fact. I definitely had not yet had time to think through the logistics of his new living situation when he dedicated a full page to “Look, I know everyone’s reading this and thinking ‘Where did Gulliver poo and what happened to his massive poos?’” and he proceeds to detail the process of him awakening early in the morning and defecating before sunrise, resulting in two very unfortunate little people having to wheelbarrow it up and take it away to be hidden somewhere. This was their unenviable permanent job when Gulliver was on the island. He ends the passage with a kind of “There, I admit it, can we all just move on now?” attitude.
In the end, the little people were planning to kill him due to the fiscal drag he was having on the economy, who among us could say that we wouldn’t do the same thing rather than continue supporting a giant with half of our country’s GDP just to give him an average meal every day. There’s some filler drama about him wading into the sea and stealing a fleet of the neighbouring islands ships, then defecting to the neighbouring island before finding some way to leave and return to England. I can’t quite remember how, he always tends to skip over the details of his miraculous escapes somewhat. He gets back and has a hard time adjusting to how big his wife and children are in comparison to the only people he has been seeing for the past few years and, in spite of having feared for his life and finally being able to spend time with his family, or maybe because of that, he swiftly leaves on another dangerous voyage. He had also brought some tiny livestock back to Europe to prove the veracity of his first travel but no one seems to care a great deal that he met a race of scaled-down humans and now has proof in the form of sheep the size of grapes.
Anyway, Gulliver sets off on another voyage and somewhere around the north west of North America he goes onto land with a group of others who swiftly abandon him to die when they realise there is a race of terrifying giants inhabiting this place. It’s worth interjecting here to point out what you will surely have realised; he has a truly abysmal record of completing safe voyages. I don’t know whether it’s bad luck or, more likely, a dire lack of expertise in seafaring but not once does he end up where he’s supposed to be and yet he keeps getting hired to go on these increasingly expensive expeditions. You’d think the financiers would get sick of their ship doctor getting shipwrecked/lost/mutinied against and presumably leaving all the sailors on the voyage with terrible untreated cases of scurvy and other such maritime ailments.
Gulliver gets picked up by some rural family of giants and they start touring around the country with him in a shoebox as some kind of sideshow attraction, the giants are very impressed that he can talk and reason and do little tricks. He seems to somewhat relish the simple life of living in a shoebox and enjoys it even more when he gets sold to the royal family. And in the same way that he did not stop talking about how little the little people are, he really does NOT stop talking about how giant the giant people are. In particular he spoke at length about how ugly the giant women are because of this. Because he could see all the pores on their face and the veins under their skin, his thesis was essentially that the more you can see of a woman, the more there is to be repulsed by. He also takes this time to mention that the little people, due to seeing their visage in less detail, seemed to him to be the most beautiful race he had ever encountered. This apparently meant he was disgusted by his ginormous wife when he returned and saw all her imperfections, giving the reader even less sympathy for Gulliver and his plight. Particularly in the understandably more treacherous world of the giants, the court dwarf tries to do him in several times and he only escapes in the end because a hawk picks up his shoebox and drops it in the ocean whereupon he gets rescued by some normal-sized people (this time, he is naturally repulsed by how small they are in comparison to the people he has been seeing for the last few years and treats them with contempt as a result).
I know it may have seemed remote at the time, but one aspect of the giant world that really irked me was that it was the one place he visited that wasn’t an island, merely a peninsula adjoining North America separated from the continent by a mountain range that I suppose keeps the giants out of Oregon. I get that the discerning reader would remark “Another island? Seriously?” if all these fantastical undiscovered places were remote pacific islands (even though there is a lot of space in the pacific with not a whole lot going on) but if you have to make one a peninsula does it have to be the home of the giants? Someone the size of an office tower will have much less difficulty traversing a mountain than someone the size of a finger, it’s just not very believable. Get it together, Swift.
Again Gulliver goes back to England, again he is repulsed by his wife and children (this time due to how small they are) and again he sets off on another voyage and finds himself alone in a new place. You are unlikely to have heard about this one if you haven’t read the book, and that is because it is much less easy to grasp than the gimmicks of ‘people are very small compared to Gulliver’, ‘people are very big compared to Gulliver’, and ‘people are horses compared to Gulliver’. That last one is the best and I’ll get to it after this, so you’ll forgive me if I run through the third fantasy land quickly. In the third country, the gimmick is that there is a massive island floating in the sky above the land below and it can be controlled like a spaceship by the emperor. He uses this to assert control over the population underneath the island, there is a great class divide between the land people and the floating people but whenever one of the intellectuals or aristocratic women go down to the ground, they like it so much more and never come back. This society probably contains some symbolism that is going over my head, but I’m not gonna feel bad about that just because I don’t understand 1720s social satire. I don’t live in the 1720s and I can hardly be blamed for that. Not an awful lot actually happened with Gulliver on this island but he learned that this crazy, far-fetched country has Japan as a trading partner so he just got on a boat to Japan and then it was much easier to get back to England from there. Way less drama than all these isolated societies that he had had to escape from previously.
The final land that Gulliver washes up on in an attempt to get away from his wife is populated by a savage race of cannibals called Yahoos and unsurprisingly old Gulliver finds himself about to be killed by them because they refused to respond to his rational debate. He escapes and finds himself in the company of some horses (they’re not all horses, they have a very sophisticated caste system that has like horses, ponies, donkeys instead of blue eyes, green eyes, brown eyes or whatever) who recognise that he must be a civilised Yahoo because he is able to talk and he wears clothes. These horses take him in and somewhat treat him like a pet, which Gulliver really doesn’t mind because he very quickly gains a massive level of respect for the reasoning and philosophising capabilities of the horse society. In fact, this is about the only place that he doesn’t want to leave. At various times he gets threatened with being exiled to the Yahoos (who are literally humans) and nothing terrifies him more. He does, as always, converse with the leader of horse society about the benefits of European civilisation but the horse picks apart the flaws in it more readily than any emperor has before. Gulliver has so much fawning respect, like everywhere he goes he learns their language, even though this one is, as you might expect, largely constructed of brays and whinnies. For a long time he is content to live out his days as a curious example of a talking human in the kingdom of the horses. Unfortunately this perfect arrangement cannot last and in the end the council of elders have a vote and decide they are going to kill him (which makes two times out of four). He gets a warning about this ruling from his master and protests vociferously, saying he would rather die than go back and live among the Yahoos of Europe. Eventually they pretty much load him onto a boat and push him out to sea.
The last few pages after his return to England are among the best, not just because you know you’re nearly at the end but also because Gulliver falls into a deep depression about whether it is worth being alive when he is not living among intelligent horses. He looks down upon the humans around him and they, in turn, relentlessly (and rightfully) make fun of him for talking in English with lots of braying noises and neighs littered into his speech. Essentially his experience that he ends up consigned to is a lot of “Oh great! Here comes Gulliver again wearing no clothes and neighing at us that we’re not as clever as horses!”
He never gets hired to lead any other sea voyage because they all think he’s dumb for talking like a horse and trying to be friends with the horses in his stables and teach them to talk. I don’t know what moral I ought to take away from that, but I must say, any author that can write a fate for their main character that gives me as much joy as this must be doing something right.
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