Jonathan Swift’s much loved character, imagined anew by Guy Walker, sails on into multiple collisions with the 21st century. If you loved the original Gulliver you’ll love the re-imagining of him. Trying, not too hard, to masquerade as a real literary discovery of a Swift manuscript
Gulliver’s NEW
Travels exactly replicates the multiple appeals of Swift’s original work. It is written in elegant Augustan prose that could have been written by the Irish wit with modern footnotes so that you can believe you are reading an original text edited by a modern scholar. Taking customary shelter from the censors and the censorious of its own age behind the barricades and dissemblings of satire it is very funny as it skewers the spirit of our modern age. It places Gulliver in well-imagined, fantasy situations which provide humour by inversion. Finally, given Swift’s fame as a wit, it has real intellectual heft in its dismantling of modern shibboleths using philosophical tools and a comprehensive understanding of the nature of political science. This means it has an enduring and profound appeal.
Lovers of classical literary prose, historical fiction, humour, fantasy, philosophy, and the study of culture and politics will all find something to enjoy as they follow Gulliver’s four brand new sojourns:
A Voyage toKhiliasticka
Gulliver and his crew encounter an island which hosts the annual Festival of the Catastrophe, which always culminates in The Frenzy, on a vast showgroundwhere contests take place. A new form of religion based on the Apockalyptic Prognostickations is mediated through a prophetess who wealthy people pay to castigate them. A deserted town with a row of decaying Arks, and Mirrors everywhere…
A Voyage to Obversia
The Obversians have discovered a new idea. If you take what is on the reverse of the Coin of Nature and obvert it you can gain power by basing a whole new morality on this new currency. There are Mines for the raw materials, the Chamber of Opticks, the Schools of the Oeconomy of Vertue andof Obversian Ethics and, for the new coins, a Royal Mint, the Jesuitical School of Active Repudiation and The School of Performing Arts all set within the Grand Academy of Obversia which bears an uncanny resemblance to a 21st Century University. And, finally, there is the Island of the Poor.
A Voyage to Ypsilosia and the Metropolis of Schro Dinga
Gulliver and his crew are captured by the Ypsilosian Navy and, in their captivity on the island, learn of the principle of Transcendence of all earthly limits and the possibility of being something and not being it at the same time. They encounter the Ypsilosian People of Quality who float at the end of tethers above the Earth. They visit the divided City of Schro Dinga bisected by the River Phrenos, witness the frenzied intellectual activity there, and make their escape.
A Voyage to St Helena
Attracted by the 24 foot Aerial Telescope set up in an Astronomical Observatory by Sir Edmund Halley(of Comet fame) to observe the stars of the Southern hemisphere in 1676, the Natural Philosophers have taken over the British Colony. They have turned the Commoners off the Common Sense as they bring about a new Enclosure; this time of Knowledge itself. The Commoners are reduced to being cognitive revenants until Gulliver participates in a revolution aided by two Royal Naval Ships of the Line.
