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Three hundred years on, Gulliver's Travels still refuses to behave. It gets shelved as a children's classic, taught as the great English satire, and cited as one of the earliest novels in the language - and it never quite fits any of those labels. Swift claimed he wrote it "to vex the world," and the remarkable thing is that it still does. The book is funnier, stranger, and considerably nastier than its reputation as a nursery adventure suggests, and any abridged edition with a cheerful Lilliput on the cover is hiding most of what makes it worth reading.

The structure is simple enough: four voyages, four impossible nations. Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon with terrible luck and a flat, credulous narrating voice, washes up first in Lilliput, where six-inch politicians wage war over which end of an egg to crack. Then comes Brobdingnag, where the proportions reverse and Gulliver becomes the insect - a curiosity carried about in a box, lectured by a giant king who concludes that Europeans must be "the most pernicious race of little odious vermin" ever to crawl the earth. The third voyage takes in the flying island of Laputa and its abstracted academics; the fourth delivers Gulliver to the Houyhnhnms, rational horses who govern with perfect calm, and the Yahoos, the filthy human-shaped brutes they keep as livestock.

The first two parts are the book's glory, and they balance each other with a precision Swift never quite recaptures. Lilliput makes human pomposity ridiculous by shrinking it; Brobdingnag makes it repulsive by magnifying it. The hall-of-mirrors effect is devastating because Swift commits so completely to the deadpan logistics - Gulliver consuming the rations of more than 1,700 Lilliputians, the chore list his hosts draw up for him, the precise mechanics of being a pet in a giant's pocket. The parody of contemporary travel writing, with its obsessive measurements and tedious accounts of winds and tides, lands even if you have never read the genre being mocked.

Honesty requires saying that the back half is a harder sell. Part three is the weakest stretch by some distance - a grab-bag of islands and ideas, sharp in conception but baggy in execution, and the satire of speculative science feels more like a catalogue than a story. The book in general goes on past the point where its arguments have landed; whole passages of legal and political explanation could be halved without loss. The prose is dated in ways that take a chapter or two of adjustment, the Capitalised Nouns and winding sentences included, and the scatology is relentless. Swift's fascination with urination, excrement, and the grosser textures of the human body is thematically deliberate - this is a book about what we are underneath our pretensions - but it wears thin, and the treatment of women, particularly the leering horror at the Brobdingnagian maids, reads as plain misogyny rather than satire of it.

Then there is Gulliver himself, who is barely a character at all - no inner life, no reflection, just a recording instrument that slowly curdles. That flatness is frustrating if you want a novel in the modern sense, and the book arguably isn't one: it lacks structural unity, a relatable hero, and any interest in psychological development. But the curdling is the point. The naive narrator of part one becomes, by part four, a misanthrope so complete that he returns home, recoils from his own wife and children, and prefers the company of his stable. Whether Swift endorses this final position or is satirizing it too remains genuinely unsettled - the Houyhnhnms are admirable and also cold, passionless, faintly totalitarian, and it is never clear whether their society is an ideal or a warning about what reason looks like with the humanity drained out. That ambiguity is not a flaw. It is the book's deepest provocation.

What survives the dated prose and the saggy third voyage is the central, uncomfortable trick: every absurd nation Gulliver visits turns out to be us. The courtiers winning office by rope-dancing, the wars fought over doctrinal trivialities, the colonizers planting flags on other people's homes in the name of civilization - none of it has aged into irrelevance. Gulliver's Travels is best read unabridged, with patience for its longueurs, and with the understanding that the joke is on the reader. Swift holds up the mirror, diminished, magnified, and finally bestial, and three centuries of self-flattery have not managed to fog the glass.