Twenty years ago, William Burroughs published the most brilliant satire in English since Gulliver's Travels. The Naked Lunch, indeed, has many points of similarity with Swift's masterpiece: a mocking contempt for power and its wielders, a shrinking disgust from the flesh (in both cases resulting in some of the most revolting scatalogical passages ever printed), a vision of mankind as almost irredeemably base, a keen eye for moral soft spots in the prevailing culture, a hatred of jargon and pomposity, a profound comic sense, a fierce indignation about privilege and, far from least, a tough, flexible prose style.

The chief difference was that Burroughs provided no Gulliver, no voyager of goodwill, with whom the reader could identify. The Naked Lunch was structured like a fairground, a series of booths each vying with the next to present a more shocking, alarming or grotesque attraction. But the fundamental impulse of...