Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)

This is one of the best things I have ever read. It is almost a cliche now to describe Gulliver’s Travels as a biting satire, but it is utterly true - and a wonderful one to boot. In a shortened, picture form, Gulliver’s Travels is one of the world’s most popular children’s book so the plot feels familiar and almost nostalgic. Along with rice cakes and marmite sandwiches, reading it took me back to my childhood. Suddenly I was eight again and running around the playground.

The story goes a bit like this. Gulliver leaves his wife and child to go travelling, and from then on has a set of the weirdest, most fantastical adventures ever set to paper. Shortly after leaving, Gulliver shipwrecks and stumbles upon Lilliput, the renowned land of little people that can walk around on his hand. After the ensuing adventures and a journey home, Gulliver embarks on a further bold voyage, but this time his ship flounders on Brobdingnag, a nation of giants where suddenly it is Gulliver who finds himself a little person. Next, after leaving, he finds all sorts of odd peoples – a floating island in the sky, magicians who can conjure the dead – and finally a land of wise and logical horses, the perspicacious Houyhnhnms. Alongside these omnibenevolent nags, he makes a discovery that turns his blood a-chill. Here, he encounters the infamous ‘Yahoos’. A savage, untameable, splenic animal that seems to bear more than a passing resemblance – in looks and habits – to the species of which Gulliver is a committed member: the unhumble human...

It's wonderful

There is just something so special about this book. It might not be the most significant aspect, perhaps, but I even loved the 16th century-style writing style. For example, every proper noun is capitalised, and letters starting with ‘h’ are always preceded with ‘an’: I saw with mine Eyes, an Hundred Savages advancing upon my poar Self.  This must have been standard at the time, but it now lends the books a delightful realism. I’m sure it gets edited out of a lot of modern editions, but I think that’s a mistake.

Gulliver’s personality binds the whole thing together like an egg in cake batter. His most striking characteristic is an ostentatious gallantry. Beached on Lilliput, and captured by the little people, he quickly pays tribute and accepts the rule of the tiny Lilliputian king, even though he is no bigger than his face; soon describing him as ‘my gracious majesty’. Ultimately, Gulliver feels entitled – being a British citizen of Her Majesty the Queen – to be treated civilly and with decorum. He expects to be welcomed into the court of every king, and for his needs to be met – food, wine and a new ‘suit of cloaths’ wherever on the globe he finds himself. This entitlement can lead him to be dreadfully naive, at times unaware of clear and present danger. 

What makes us human?

Yet what makes the book interesting is how Gulliver sees the world. It is a fascinating sum of contradictions. Gulliver is overtly proud of his country, and acts as an ambassador wherever he goes. But he also embarks on new life-styles with gusto. In three of the places he visits, he settles, stays for years, learns the language and embraces their lifestyle - even though it’s almost the opposite of his own. However, Gulliver thinks of his own society as far more sophisticated and on a ‘higher level’ than any of the civilisations he visits. In fact, nothing gets him questioning his homeland, until he meets the Yahoos....

The Yahoos are a breed of savage humans. Gulliver is repulsed by them because he sees the character of the despicable Yahoo’s mirrored in humans, and the character of the horses as far superior. So, he never quite manages to critique British society and it’s institutions – something that is changeable – but just the human character – which isn’t (especially not en masse). 

I think that’s quite significant, and clearly a Swiftian commentary on something. I see it as saying a range of things from a kind of Thatcherite proclamation that society doesn’t exist, to the idea that culture is just the emergent phenomena that arises out of the character’s of the people that live there. I think that’s dead wrong - and actually so would most sociologists today. Institutions are incredibly important, but Gulliver is only concerned with character. I can’t quite tell which side of the fence Swift himself sat on – but since his most vicious critique is on personality traits, I’ll put flag down and say that he got this one wrong. He savagely critiqued humans character - and finds fault with the echos of our animal urges in the way we live, but he didn’t stop to mention how amazing it is that we’ve developed institutions that work well despite all our Yahoo-like greed.

Life Lessons

I think I missed a lot of the satire in the book – especially since I’m not au fait with the subtleties of George I’s court – but I think I got the main point, and it’s exceptionally clever. By creating and describing so many fantastical species – little men, big men, magicians, talking horses – the book is essentially an exercise in frame setting. It is priming us, by poking fun at imaginary beings, to be able to picture ourselves objectively. Gulliver rocks up at Lilliput and finds a bunch of weird little people, but what if he rocked up in Britain, what strange species would he find there? Humans. 

Swift want us to take a long look at what we really are. For him it’s obvious. We’re just savages, monkeys, a slave to our urges. And we've painstakingly built a society that pretends we’re not. That’s problematic, because it means we’re literally unaware of how stupid some of our actions are. Once you start looking as Jonathan Swift wanted us to look, everything becomes ridiculous. From living in houses that are so far superfluous to our needs, to border conflicts, to political slanging matches. This is all comes from animalistic, primal urges – which are just stupid. And yet we pretend that there’s a good intelligent reason for everything, that things are the way they are for a reason. As a culture, we do not live rationally. Our selfish, grubbing instincts are built into the very fabric of our society. But, as I mentioned earlier, that’s only half the story. Actually, society is brilliant, amazing, incredible - and it’s a testament to human ingenuity that we’ve managed to design ourselves a system that succeeds not despite, but because of, the character of the human race. 

And yet, we can do more. We can continue to strive towards building a better world. To be better, to live better together, and to help those that get left behind. It's not all doom and gloom, but there's no time for complacency either. Let's get cracking...

Hamlet

This play is - of course - brilliant, archetypal, riveting and confounding all at once. On finishing it, I just wanted to read it again in order to pick up on all the things that I had missed. And then, no doubt, again. In fact, I got the feeling that life wouldn’t be too bad if I just listened to a recording of Hamlet on repeat endlessly, forever.

After one parse, there is just so, so much that I missed. But I think I got a lot too. I read an Open University text with a page of explanatory notes on the left of each page of play - that helped.

Hamlet is a play worth thinking about. Unlike with lots of fiction, asking yourself why the characters act the way they do, trying to go beyond the words into the psychology of the characters is very fruitful. There is always a good reason for everything.

The mentality of Hamlet losing his nerve as he yearns to murder the usurping king seem so... human. Whilst reading - and afterwards - I found myself slotting parts of my life in the Shakespearean mold; the narrative helping me to understand the world around me. Much of life is described in this play.

And of course, it’s a tragedy. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that everyone ends up dying in a heap on the floor. The drama builds and builds, and the tension ratchets up until the final explosive scene. I found the play quite claustrophobic. The plot revolves around a tight band of courtiers and kings who become cloistered, feeding off each others contrivances, grievances and dark impulses. There is no light from the outside world to disinfect this rank pit of emotions.  Their lives become mentally unhealthy, a steaming cesspool of bubbling murkiness and frustrated desire, that eventually overflows into spectacular and chaotic doom.

My thoughts 

I recommend reading Hamlet. I have seen the play on stage twice, watched the film and listened to a radio production. But reading enabled a completely different - and richer - experience. Watching Hamlet as a play allows you to pick up on the context. You can see what’s going on by the expressions and intonation of the actors. It makes the play seem alive.

However, Shakespeare is very densely packed with information. For example take this phrase:

 “The dram of evil doth all the noble substance of a doubt to his own scandal”,

If I heard an actor say that, I might understand the emotion behind the speech, but I wouldn't have time to decode the metaphor. To me, it means ‘a little evil in someone makes us doubt all their good qualities - which is to our detriment’.

I think that’s quite profound. If someone is generally nice, and they act nastily one day we might say ‘now I’ve seen what they’re really like’. Too often people are willing to let a small amount of bad behaviour colour an overwhelmingly positive experience of someone. I find Shakespeare full of this kind of deep insight about life, and it’s easy to miss when simply watching a play.

I bravely attempt a criticism

I can’t really critique Shakespeare (I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the play is operating on a deeper level that I am), but if someone forced me to, I could perhaps come up with one thing. I was slightly disappointed with a plot device in the last act. Hamlet is dueling Laertes with swords. Laertes, taking part in a plot developed with the king, has poisoned his sword in order to try and kill Hamlet. Half way through the duel they - somehow! - switch swords, with Hamlet now holding the poisoned one. Hamlet promptly stabs Laertes with the poison tip who (spoiler alert) dies.

Wait a second - during a duel they somehow manage to swap swords?! This seems such a random, unbelievable course of events, almost as if it were just a device to make sure that both characters die. There was an asterisk in the text that I read saying ‘this might seem crude, but actually during live action this could happen very easily in a scuffle’. I’m not too convinced. Quite a crucial outcome of the play hangs on Hamlet and Laertes accidentally switching swords whilst fencing.

The last word

Should everyone read this?  God, yes.

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that he got most of the inspiration for his writing from lucid dreams. Jekyll and Hyde came to him in a nightmare - his wife concerned at his fitful sleeping cries, woke him.  Disappointed he replied ‘'Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.' 

The book opens with Mr. Utterson, a prosecutor, who is friends with a friendly and scholarly man, Dr Jekyll. He has been hearing from various sources about the dastardly exploits around London of one Mr. Hyde. Hyde, gossip tells, had recently wantonly trampled over a girl in the street. Mr. Utterson is concerned as he knows that Jekyll has some kind of relationship with this fiendish Hyde. In fact, Jekyll has given Hyde unrestricted access to his house to come and goes as he pleases. Fearing his friend is under some dark influence, Utterson makes some enquiries. These become even more urgent when Mr. Hyde is believed to have brutally murdered an MP. Finally, Utterson discovers the truth in a letter from Jekyll. It explains that, with the aid of a ghoulish medical concoction, he has managed to split his personality into a good part and an evil part. However, now having run out of potion, he must remain permanently as the infamous and degenerate Hyde. 

My thoughts

This story is phenomenally well known. So much so that the main characters ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ are commonly used to describe anyone whose personality is somewhat changeable. Our cultural knowledge of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is so strong that actually reading the thing feels like going back to your house and finding everything in a slightly different place. There is much less exciting dual personality, good vs. evil, action than you would expect from a book that typifies the genre. Even the title, ‘Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ feels weird and wrong. 

Jekyll and Hyde is thought-provoking though. To an extent, living in society necessitates suppressing our basest urges. You could think of it like a clown’s balloon. As we squeeze one part of our personality into an acceptable shape, all that energy just pops up somewhere else. I think it’s also quite familiar to feel a distinct shift between modes. We talk of ‘bottling things up’ and then letting them go, or ‘blowing up’. And we notice this in our friends too. Part of the reason I think Jekyll and Hyde is so well known, is it speaks to the truth of this. People often do seem to have different sides to their personality, and this novella is the archetypal narrative of this.

Stories help us understand the world around us. They give us a structure to events. From religious stories to fairy tales and fables each contains pinches of reality, triple distilled down to its very essence. Jekyll and Hyde, then, describes something quite fundamental in the human experience. I think it was the first story to capture  our changeable nature in a way that resonates with the world we live in.

Welcome to the dark side

Whilst Jekyll and Hyde is an exemplar story, I think its morality is quite subversive - and very different - to that of our times. I see it as a deeply and fundamentally a Christian narrative - which is odd because Louis Stevenson rejected Christianity. To me the basic moral takeaway is: don’t dabble with your dark-side, because it will consume you. The plot condensed into one sentence would  be: Jekyll releases some of his inner base urges, finds he can’t control them and get stuck as his shadow self.

Some say that, actually, Dr. Jekyll went too far in suppressing his animalistic urges - when he released the valve it came out like an explosion. But I don’t think that really makes sense. Mr. Hyde is far darker than Dr. Jekyll is good. Jekyll is, if anything, a normal member of society, not some bastion of saintliness. He isn’t helping old ladies cross the street or donating his money to orphan children. In fact he dabbles in a dark laboratory dissecting animals, and says that although he tries hard to be pure he continually experiences dark urges. Hyde, on the other hand, is a murderous thug, almost sub-human in his capacity for evil and lack of regard for social norms.

So to me, the story wants to tell us that in every human there is a bottomless pit of evil which can’t be allowed out without devastating consequences. That sounds very evangelical. Taking one more small step of conjecture, it almost seems that Louis Stevenson took on board all of the teachings of Christianity about the nature of humanity, and rejected just the spirituality. By doing so, perhaps he felt forced into taking the pessimistic view that there was then nothing we could do to control the animal inside all of us. Stevenson even appears to have lived a little of the libertine lifestyle too. 

By my reading, Jekyll and Hyde isn’t really an exploration of good and evil, it is really just a study of the evil - the animal - inside of us.

The last word

Jekyll and Hyde is a short little book - worth a read if you've got an hour to kill. What more could you ask for? It’s a little gripping Victorian horror that explores the consequences of living a double life, but more importantly it’s a good look at the philosophy of what it is to be human.

Three things Moby Dick will teach you about life

Moby Dick is a must read. But it doesn’t belong on a top-shelf of stuffy classics coated in dust. It lives, and breathes, and everyone needs to read this book. 

‘Call me Ishmael’, the book begins, and from there it’s a headlong descent into an obsession-fuelled madness. And, because the levels of meaning run deeper than a whale’s dive, it will challenge your mind and take you places - weird, strange places - that you otherwise wouldn’t go. And that doesn’t just mean a whale-ship off the Cape Horn; it’ll take you on a journey down into your own mind too.

If you want to see everything, do everything -  and who wouldn’t -  reading Moby Dick shouldn’t just be on your bucket list, it should be on tomorrow’s to-do.

Here’s the top three things that Moby Dick will teach you.

1) Walk the line

There’s a fine balance between being passionate and obsessed. Reading Moby Dick will teach you exactly what it takes to find that balance.

You cannot necessarily trust the people around you to tell you when you’ve crossed the line into obsession. The captain, Abraham, manages to convince the crew to go on his crazy whale hunt. He is convincing and evangelical and unwilling to listen to reason. 

Every achievement requires some kind of single-minded focus. And being blinkered to criticism can be necessary for success. However, if you are obsessed with something - especially if it’s the wrong thing - it is unlikely that you will be able to accept good feedback. And that means people won’t want to give you it. 

It’s a tough balancing act. If you are put off by every negative comment, you won’t be able to do anything significant. But if you don’t listen to criticism, you might spend years doing the wrong thing, wasting your resources.

Moby Dick shows us how to find that midpoint. Listen to specific people you trust. But most importantly, be the judge of your own actions. The best way to tell if you are obsessed with the wrong thing is seeing its effect in the world. Do you have to say or do crazy things to justify your beliefs. Are you circumventing the globe chasing your very own white whale?

2) Meet your shadow

Abraham, the captain, becomes obsessed with killing a white-whale that ‘reaped’ his leg. This famous obsession is infinitely interpretable. The ferocious, unbending anger that Abe feels towards the Sperm-Whale, ultimately, is symbolic of the anger that is inside us all. Abraham’s fury, pointless and driven, has lived in all of us at some point: with a boss, parent, friend, or partner. We’ve all felt that flash of white rage when you just want to put your fists up and fight. 

Moby Dick forces you to confront your inner demons - and experience the futility of them. By letting you live, vividly, the nightmarish, logical conclusion of this blinding anger, it will let you see - feel - how utterly foolish it is. It shows you that you’ll end up bent on ripping up the world with hate, chasing around the world something that only exists inside your mind.

3) Do your dues

Decks need scrubbing, food needs making and whales need catching. In the life of an adult there is a certain amount of life-admin that just needs to be done. You’ll always need to wash up and polish your shoes. Work needs to get done.

Moby Dick teaches you that however tumultuous life is, there is nobility in keeping your life in order. A ships deck gets dirty constantly, it always needs cleaning. How much easier to let it stay dirty. But being able to create a home is one thing that separates us from animals. And a well-run ship is the one thing that keeps the tempestuous ocean at bay.

Moby Dick is a foundational piece of literature, and reading it is an experience to be treasured. Like all great novels, when you’ve made the journey and look back - you'll be able to enjoy more than just the view. It will change you too.



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Moby Dick is available on Amazon - only two pounds!