Swiftly sees Adam Roberts in pastiche mode, wherein he riffs on a proto-sf classic to produce something sharply satirical and piquantly post-modern, all the while shining a light on the elephants in our collective room.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Sadly, by comparison to his recent works, Roberts seems to have fallen a little flat with Swiftly.

This time, the source text is Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Set well over a century after Gulliver’s voyage, Swiftly takes place in a mid-nineteenth century England which will seem familiar in some ways and strange in others.

The English have taken to capturing Lilliputians and using them to do microscopic engineering work that revolutionises mechanical technology. This has caused friction with France, who wish to see the little folk liberated from slavery. The English do not consider the Lilliputians to be enslaved, as they do not consider them to be human.

And so we meet our first viewpoint character, Abraham Bates—a gentleman of sensitive disposition who has colluded with the French in the cause of Lilliputian liberty. Once the French have conquered England with the aid of the giant Brobdingnagians, he finds himself caught between two masters thanks to his treachery.

He also finds himself in love with our second lead, Eleanor Burton, a young lady of intellect and science. Recently married (and even more recently widowed), both she and Bates end up travelling the war-torn English countryside en route to York with the French army’s Calculating Engine.

At which point, things start to go even more badly wrong for everyone concerned.

There is no shortage of ideas in Swiftly; Roberts’ characters are bundles of contradictory drives and emotions. Bates seems to be a well-executed attempt at portraying a manic depressive character in an era unfamiliar with modern psychology. Poor Bates swings from profound melancholia to frantic happiness like a wonky pendulum, and his mood swings play no little part in his story arc. His quixotic choices are rarely the wisest course of action, but the reader’s sympathy is always with him—even though he’s a terrible buffoon.

Eleanor’s richness of character comes from her place at the intersection of a number of social strata: the only daughter of a lower-middle-class family fallen on hard times, married off to a nouveau-riche industrialist; a bookish woman fascinated by mathematics and science in an era when science was strictly the province of men. Her viewpoint lets Roberts take passing pot-shots at current topics such as creationism, as well as the sexual repression and prudishness of the time.

Roberts has adopted the idiom of the era, writing in the Victorian mode of overwrought and clumsy prose. The principle benefit is the authentic voices that the language gives the characters, whose laughably stiff-backed metaphors raise more than the occasional smile. But it’s a double-edged sword: the verbose style is tough going for a reader acclimatised to the concision of modern fiction. It’s also strangely jarring when something more current slips in—I figure only Roberts knows whether he deliberately included a punk rock album title in a chapter about the rebellious Eleanor, or whether that phrase simply leapt unbidden to the page. Roberts being Roberts, however, I suspect the former.

The core theme of Swiftly is prejudice, along with the hypocrisy that often accompanies it—but the prejudice of the English toward their miniature engineers is just the start. The long-established English loathing of the French gets a vigorous lampooning, along with sexism, class hatred, religious intolerance and common-or-garden racism… and the little interpersonal prejudices we all can’t help but harbour. Prejudice, sad to say, is still a rich seam for an author to mine.

Perhaps too rich in this case, however. I reached the end of Swiftly and found myself wondering what Roberts had been trying to tell me. He has stood accused of being overly subtle before, but this is the first novel of his that I have read which seemed genuinely opaque in purpose, perhaps because so many targets are aimed for.

I’m guessing he intends Swiftly to attack our thinking in many small ways, like the pin-prick swords of a Lilliputian army, rather than bludgeoning us with one single Brobdingnagian IDEA. But while I can’t find fault with Roberts’ insight and intelligence, I feel Swiftly demonstrates a momentary failure to communicate that vision effectively.