The Voyage of Captain Popanilla

Written at twenty-two, this is the precocious debut of the future two-time Prime Minister, a biting voyage satire in the Swift tradition. Captain Popanilla rules the innocent Isle of Fantaisie, where inhabitants live in blissful ignorance of the outside world until a shipwreck delivers him to its shores. What follows is a gleefully merciless tour through the absurdities of European civilization: pompous philosophers, self-important statesmen, and societies so wedded to their own conventions that they cannot see their own madness. Popanilla, untainted by "civilization," becomes the perfect mirror: his innocent questions expose the pretensions, hypocrisies, and vanities that everyone else takes for granted. It is a young man's book, sharp-elbowed and confident, more interested in skewering pomposity than in offering solutions. The satire rarely lets up, and its target is not any single nation but the human propensity for taking ourselves far too seriously.