One for the Road – Dulliver’s Travels

Wearily picking my way through part two of Gulliver’s Travels this week, I began to panic that you might be getting as fed up hearing about my roamings as I am reading about those of Lemuel Gulliver.

My struggle with the book turned into an eye-opening exercise in extreme empathy, one that the author, centuries dead as he is, could never have foreseen – but not before I’d nearly torn my hair out.

Before leaving O Town two months ago, I set about putting together a bundle of books to keep me going while I am away.

The selection process I employed was similar to the one by which I stocked up on socks, drawers and all the other sumptuous finery I’d needed for my travels: First I made a good number of impetuous purchases from the local charity shops, then the rest of the articles I salvaged from the shadowy recesses of my bedroom.

Anyway, the day before departing, with my backpack bursting with clothes, trainers, toiletries and all the rest, I looked upon my packing with the irrational pride that all men take in the speedy execution of said task.

“I am a quare and quick packer,” I congratulated myself, half-tempted to call my aul boy to come see the feat his progeny had performed.

But before I had the chance to roar for my da and the paternal approval he would surely have showered me with, I realised I had made a balls: My bag was straining at the seams and I hadn’t even packed the books yet, which stacked in a pile measured about two feet tall.

So began a ruthless ten minutes of discarding and retaining books, until eventually my library was of a size I could squeeze into my bag. Or, as Lemuel Gulliver might say: Thus commenced my performance of a computation wherein I succeeded in decreasing my prodigious (his favourite word) collection of literature to a sufficiently diminutive (his second favourite word) mass that allowed each and every page to be admitted to the contents of my luggage carrier.

Because, aye, that’s the way Lemuel Gulliver goes on.

For those not overly familiar with the book, Lemuel Gulliver is the protagonist from Jonathan Swift’s 1729 classic ‘Gulliver’s Travels’.

Travels, as some fans affectionately call it, is supposed to be Swift’s satirical masterpiece, his tour de force, a novel that not long after publishing was already well on its way to earning its place in the immortal annals of great Irish, and maybe even world, literature. Hence why it made the cut as one of my travel books.

A lesser-known fact though, is this: Reading Gulliver’s Travels is absolutely detrimental to the modern reader’s mental health.

The book works on two levels – only one of which I, and most people born post-1900, stand a chance of understanding.

Superficially it takes the form of something close to a children’s book: It is a tale about a seaman who sails the world and, on his travels, comes across four distinct and hitherto undiscovered civilisations.

As a straightforward fantasy novel, some of plot-lines and set-pieces are pretty funny, like when Mr Gulliver, during his short stint in the land of the little, falls out of favour with the royal family when he puts out a fire at the imperial palace by urinating on it.

However, it is the same stuff that made it a great work of satire at its time that now makes it such a patience-testing read today.

Well, for one, Swift decided to give his protagonist a pompous, overly-formal, wordy, convoluted way of speaking and writing, which renders the whole read turgid and rhythmless. Apparently though, as I found out online, this was purposely done to parody the detached, prosaic, disingenuously objective style that was in vogue with many travel writers of the day.

For a reader at the time who was familiar with the soporific style of writing that Swift was lampooning, this was probably as hilarious for them as it was humiliating for the authors that found themselves at the butt of the joke.

However, for me, who hasn’t been demented by these bores, Lemuel Gulliver is not parodying one, he is one.

Anyway, every page of Swift’s magnum opus might have been side-splitting stuff at the time, but, for me, the man who last night fired the book across the room, it is as tiring a read today as it probably was riveting when it was first published.

However, it wasn’t a total bust. It taught me one useful thing: I now know just how boring it can be to listen to somebody harp on about their travels.

Oh, and there was one more lesson actually: Even the best social commentaries don’t read as well 300 years after they were written. Who’d have thought it?