Page 114 - Gullivers

Chris Riddell
Most of Swist’s major thematic concerns and the objects of his satire
are represented in Jenkins’ text and in Riddell’s illustration. These include his concern with education, intellectual satire, his political satire, and in gentler forms his religious satire, his misogynistic comments, his obsession with the body, attack on colonialism and his ultimate attack on human pride. Possibly Swist’s most striking theme is his consistent attack on war: the silliness of its causes, the monstrous nature of its weaponry, the horror and cruelty of its results. There is a clear anti-war section in three out of the four books, and the horror and revulsion grow in intensity from one book to the next. However this theme, though treated in each section of the Jenkins/Riddell version, is given surprisingly little force or prominence and, given the scale of the illustration
in the book as a whole, is very modestly illustrated. This reticence is especially puzzling in view of the fact that the book was published a year aster the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the build-up to which had provoked the most sustained and popular anti-war protest in British history. In Jenkins’ and Riddell’s account these sections are considerably shortened and simplified. In the Brobdingnag section Jenkins’s account of war is one paragraph long and retains little of Swist’s terrible brutality. The only accompanying illustration is one of Gulliver and the king in conversation (p.70-71). The reader is expected to register the full horror of what has been described from the expression depicted on the king’s partial side-face. In the final book where Gulliver again gives his master an account of war, Riddell’s illustration consists of a single, relatively small, pink-coloured image of the dead on a battlefield at the end of action, observed by a bemused rider-less horse (p.128-29). It has little of the power of, for example Raymond Briggs’ great anti-war battle scenes in The Tin Pot General and the Old Iron Woman, or indeed in Michæl Foreman’s War-Game. Though it may be argued that, in a book for the young, accounts of violence need to be toned down, there are strong precedents for realistic and hard-hitting anti-war illustration in British picturebooks. One of the most recognisable contemporarily relevant enduring universal themes in
108