Gulliver’s Travels can be a different book to different people: a ripping yarn, a social satire, a parody of a travelogue as a literary form, or a children’s fantasy. In calling on the talent of David Hyde Pearce as narrator, the publishers have gone for the satirical angle: his hilarious performance brings out the text’s sly digs at European social, political, and religious mores, as well as his perpetual air of injured pride. (His delivery of the line “the malice of a Dutchman” is worth the price of the audiobook alone.) His tendency to pomposity and misplaced noblesse oblige serves to highlight Swift’s exploration of the gap between how we view ourselves and our actual behavior. Here, Pearce is merely drawing on the inherent comedy in the disparity between the earnestness of the text and its subject: witness the passage where Gulliver puts out a fire in the Lilliputian royal residence “by urine, which I voided in such a quantity, and applied so well to the proper places, that in three minutes the fire was wholly extinguished, and the rest of that noble pile, which had cost so many ages in erecting, preserved from destruction”.

In the book’s topsy-turvy world, Irish-born Swift holds up a funhouse mirror to the foibles of the Old World in all its social divisions, constant warring, religious strife, and political bickering. The modernity of his arguments (no less than the bite of his wit) is bracing. Although the first half of Gulliver’s Travels stands as its strongest, covering what most of us remember when we think of the book, there is much to relish throughout, particularly since Pearce’s performance creates a tangible character that the listener will want to stick with, in all his vainglorious pride and increasing misfortunes. This is a perfect example of a sympathetic marriage between voice and text reanimating a classic. —Dafydd Phillips