Page 112 - Gullivers

In fact it seems to me that the illustration in this section is the most successful in the whole work, capturing the almost insane energy of the original.
The anti-colonial politics of Swist is replicated as well: Laputa, the flying island, overcomes rebellion in its dependant territories by hovering over them and blocking out sunlight and rain. Swist’s anti-Dutch and anti-Japanese comments, which have a religious basis, are omitted from this version. This section ends
with a single-page spread in black and white depicting a romantic embrace between Gulliver and his wife on his arrival home, which links in beautifully with the opening of the final section where a parallel page and a half spread shows Gulliver blithely riding away from his now pregnant wife.
Book four represents the increasing darkness of Swist’s vision. Jenkins retains all the important episodes and details of Swist’s narrative: Gulliver’s shock and disgust in his encounters with the simian Yahoos, his seduction by the quiet dignity and rationality of the Houyhnhnms, his alienation from humanity and his descent into loneliness and madness. Both Yahoos and Houyhnhnms are superbly and realistically drawn and coloured by Riddell. There is something very expressive about both creatures. Gulliver becomes like a child again here, first drinking a bowl of milk, then listening and learning carefully. The Houyhnhnms have no word for lying: instead they use the awkward phrase ‘he said the thing which is not.’ Neither Houyhnhnms nor Yahoos share the human preoccupation with clothes. Gulliver is exposed here and obliged to show his almost naked body. The Houyhnhnms cannot understand his shame about private parts of the body. Gulliver’s master cannot understand ‘why nature should teach us to hide anything that nature has given us’ (p.126).
In conversations between Gulliver and his master the anti-war theme reaches a terrifying climax in Swist’s original that continues over several pages: saying that over a million people have been killed in the recent long war with France: listing the causes of war, including a savage account of weapons and the destruction they cause and ending with ... ‘beheld the dead bodies drop
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