The deadpan giant of Irish satire

Can this year's choice for Dublin's One City One Book initiative spark a Gulliver revival? Eileen Battersbyhopes that it can

LEMUEL GULLIVER, ship's doctor with a propensity for experiencing misfortune at sea, is a teller of tall tales - or is he? True or false, one would have to concede that his yarns give the word "fantastical" new meaning. Gulliver's Travels, which was published anonymously in 1726 and remains fresh, funny and aggressive, is as subversively imaginative as it is satirical and inventive.

The book is divided into four long sequences, each featuring an adventure after a voyage has gone staggeringly wrong. (In the case of the Laputa sequence, there are also several minor journeys.) If read in childhood, Gulliver's Travels is exciting, at times possibly bewildering. But for the reader with a grasp of the history and politics of Swift's day, the authorial intent becomes clear - and while Gulliver may well be delusional, possibly insane, his creator is not. Should his specific political targets elude you, it is still obvious that Jonathan Swift, a quick-tempered humanitarian possessed of a well-developed sense of moral indignation, compassion and an understanding of a wide range of personal disappointments, had little tolerance for mankind's multiple defects.

Now almost 300 years old, Dean Swift's earthy polemic has been back in the news over the past month. Banners featuring Gulliver's Travels as the choice for Dublin's third One City One Book initiative have encouraged visitors as well as citizens to return to a work that is a mainstay of university literature courses and school set text lists, as well as having been simplified and adapted many times for children. There have been many editions and translations; a huge body of critical writing; and more recently, cartoons and movies. It is an even more complex work than Lewis Carroll's magnificent Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865.

Although the more specific satire is aimed at English political life and the wider criticism of man's misbehaviour is aimed at humans in general, it should be noted that this is also a major work of early modern Irish literature. Swift may have been a reluctant Irishman, but he was, and remains, a Dublin writer. Yeats was right: Swift is around every corner, particularly in that area of the city extending between St Patrick's Cathedral, Christ Church, Dublin Castle, Temple Bar and St Patrick's Hospital, which he founded. And he was a personality: difficult, moody, quick to take offence. After all, this was the man who argued with Handel over where Messiah would be performed..

It shouldn't be assumed that Gulliver's Travels has always enjoyed the status of an honoured work, considering that it was described as "vicious" by none other than Dr Johnson, who dismissed it as "written in open defiance of truth and regularity". By the mid-19th century, William Makepeace Thackeray, a man most would credit with a good sense of humour, denounced it as a book of the Devil.

Still, it was well-received on publication: 10,000 copies, apparently, were sold within three weeks of its being unleashed on the public - and this at a time when the buying of books was a luxury. Extracts were published, and it was immediately translated into French and Dutch. And if the good Dr Johnson despised it, Swift's close friend, the mercurial wit and poet, Alexander Pope, loved it, celebrating Gulliver's Travels in poems such as Ode to Quinbus Flestrin (Lilliputian for "man mountain") and the hilarious To Mr Lemuel Gulliver, the Grateful Address of the Unhappy Houyhnhnms, Now in Slavery and Bondage in England. Pope and fellow poet John Gay announced: "From the highest to the lowest, it is universally read, from the cabinet to the nursery."

SOME SEVEN YEARS before its publication, Daniel Defoe had, in 1719, published Robinson Crusoe, based on the real-life experiences of Alexander Selkirk. Defoe's narrative is convincing realism and has been acknowledged as the first English novel. Swift's work is very different: a ferocious political and social polemic wrapped in a brilliantly grotesque humour. By the time he wrote it, he was the acknowledged master satirist of his age, a man who understood the power of extreme comic devices. More than 20 years earlier, in 1704, he had published The Battle of the Books and A Tale of the Tub.

Much of the sheer drive of Gulliver's Travels springs from its deadpan tone. Gulliver is an ordinary man, practical, correct, direct, a natural reporter who appears underwhelmed by his bizarre adventures, which he does eventually concede are "strange, improbable tales". His escapades always end up focusing on some defect of human nature, the pettiness, the greed or, in the case of the flying island of Laptua, the obsessiveness.

Central to the Laputa sequence is Swift's attack on the South Sea Company. It is also hilarious to observe the so-called wise men intent on extracting sunshine from cucumbers. The pettiness of human nature is lampooned to brilliant effect in the self-important citizens of Lilliput, who battle over the preferred methodology of cracking eggs.

Madness interested Swift in much the same way as it has preoccupied a modern master, JG Ballard, several of whose narrators have been doctors who are invariably insane and find themselves in extreme situations.

Gulliver opens his account with a brief biography:

"My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire; I was the third of five sons. He sent me to Emmanuel College in Cambridge, at 14 years old, where I resided three years, and applied myself close to my studies: but the charge of maintaining me . . . being too great for a narrow fortune, I was bound apprentice to Mr James Bates, an eminent surgeon in London, with whom I continued: and my father now and then sending me small sums of money, I laid them out in learning navigation, and other parts of the mathematics, useful to those who intend to travel, as I always believed it would be in some time or other my fortune to do so."

Well, it was to prove more than his fortune; it was his fate to have "an active and restless life". Gulliver starts travelling, only to be shipwrecked, taken prisoner, bound by tiny ropes tied to his hair and staked to the ground, and later force-fed and/or nursed by a repulsive giant breast. On another voyage, his crew mutinies and Gulliver is ejected from his ship, finding himself in Houyhnhnmland, a kind of paradise where noble and highly rational horses rule over nasty, degenerate creatures called Yahoos (who are, alas, human). In creating the word Yahoo, Swift not only invented a wonderful sound, he also bequeathed us with the definitive phrase for all unsavoury life forms masquerading as humans.

The Houyhnhnm sequence is the strongest in the book, because not only does Swift, through Gulliver, consider the many failings of man, his pettiness, cruelty, greed, general repulsiveness and craving for strife, but he also exposes the abuse of horses.

The Houyhnhnms are remarkable, god-like and consistently amazed at the misbehaviour of man. Gulliver settles happily among them. However, the Houyhnhnm council eventually decides that he must either live as a Yahoo or leave.

His departure causes him immense grief, and on returning to his family, with whom he now has difficulty communicating, Gulliver buys two horses "which I keep in a good stable . . . my horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four hours every day. They are strangers to bridle or saddle; they live in great amity with me, and in friendship to each other."