Page 102 - Gullivers

Everything about the presentation of Swist’s original work, whether the English edition of 1726 or the Irish edition of 1735, with its opening letter
from Richard Sympson, Gulliver’ s ‘cousin’ and ‘intimate friend’, to the reader,
is designed to enable the reader to suspend disbelief, to enter this as he or she would any travel book: to accept the reliability of Gulliver as narrator (‘it became a sort of proverb among his neighbours in Redriff, when anyone affirmed a thing, to say it was as true as if Mr Gulliver had spoke it’ Writings of Swist, p.viii).
The experience of first seeing and opening the Martin Jenkins/Chris Riddell version is precisely the opposite to opening Swist’s original or indeed many
of the retellings for children. From the highly comic, clown-like, motley-attired Gulliver that is depicted in a daring mock-crucifixion on the dust-jacket
to the drunken leprechaun-like Gulliver on the fly-leaf, to the bespectacled Gulliver dressed in a mixture of clothing from all four lands of his travels on
the title-page, to the insane Gulliver frantically perusing the scattered manuscript of his travels, secretly observed by his anxious wife, everything
is visually designed to convince the reader that he or she is entering a world
of absurd or comic fantasy and not a traditional travel book. In a post-modern way the book draws attention to itself as artefact. The book design, page
layout, subversion of traditional page margins, variety of ways in which lists are compiled, movement of text around the illustrations all combine so that the reader cannot lose him- or her-self in the book. They also make the text difficult to read in the sense that the reader is constantly obliged to look up and down and back and forth across double spreads to follow the narrative, rather like reading a comic or graphic novel, but with much more text. The effect is radically different from encountering Swist’s original work, or indeed from encountering most of the other illustrated versions for children, which by and large function
in the tradition of realistic representational art. This difference is entirely created by the illustration and design. Jenkins’ plain retelling is by and large faithful
to both the tone and detail of Swist’s original.
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