Roald Dahl

Answering the big question of: does he hold up?

Hi all, welcome to this week’s Snarf. This week we’re taking a look at one of the most important chapter book authors of the last fifty years.

First, please forward this along to anyone who might get something out of it, and feel free to drop this subscription link in any school message boards or other places parents congregate.

If you’re new here, you can check out the archives at this link, and subscribe using this handy box right here.

Now onto…

The Author: Roald Dahl

The Illustrator (almost always): Quentin Blake

Yeah, I know, this isn’t a series. But we ought to talk about one of the seminal children’s authors of my upbringing and possibly yours as well. Roald Dahl books were treasures, masterpieces to me. I honestly hadn’t thought about this much until now, but he almost has to be one of my major creative influences.

But do they hold up? Are they problematic?

Mostly and sometimes.

In general: his work remains fantastically creative, compelling, and often very funny. Quentin Blake’s illustrations are wonderfully expressive. Blake’s actually a good introduction to illustrations that don’t go for conventional ideas of beauty or scene presentation. He’s got a Steadman-like expressive squiggle.

However, the bad guys are often truly cruel and nasty. It’s very possible that your kid has not encountered a character as vile in any book or show. A cartoon character that is bent on death and destruction might be worse on some level than James’ aunts or Mr. Fox’s triple nemeses Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, but Dahl’s bad guys are more human, more threatening, and so more wretched. The way they relish in their cruelty is unsettling in a way that say, Romeo from the PJ Masks is not.

On those same lines, the main characters are often truly miserable at the beginning.

Also, the guy was racist, sexist, and anti-semitic. His editors and publishers managed to scrub most of that out from his manuscripts (sometimes after the original printing), but you’ll still find traces — see the note about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory below.

Here are some quick notes on specific books. This only includes ones I’ve read to my son. I absolutely loved The Witches, The BFG, and Matilda when I was a kid, but Leo is six, and they could literally give him nightmares, so we’ll save those for later. I noticed The Witches in a bookstore the other day (apparently there’s a graphic novel version) and flipped it open to see if it was as terrifying as I remember. It is. It’s also an excellent and unique story, but not one I plan to read to my six-year-old.

Fantastic Mr. Fox: This one is really fun. It’s long enough to feel like an involved, multipart story, but short for a chapter book with bite-sized chapters. The animals tunneling around and getting each other food makes for a very understandable, lovable plot. As mentioned, the farmers are nasty and talk about how much they want to kill Mr. Fox. I did some editing on the fly to change “kill” to “get” and skipped over the occasional ugly turn of phrase. Also, be warned that Mr. Fox’s tail gets shot off at one point pretty early on.

The Wes Anderson movie is fun and very much its own thing. Lots of animated rifles and some growly dogs, but nothing too frightening.

Anderson invents a bunch of characters and relationship dynamics between them and — really if you just changed a few details you wouldn’t have any idea it’s based on the book, but don’t let that dissuade you.

James and the Giant Peach: Also lots of fun, but man is James miserable for the first 30 or so pages. It’s not just “James was bummed, but then a huge peach shows up,” it’s many pages of life sucking for this kid. When I was reading it to Leo (I think he was four the first time we tried it), he said “why is this a sad book?” I ended up skipping ahead to when the peach starts to appear. Also, be warned that his parents die in the first few pages (it just says that they’re killed by a rhinoceros with no further explanation).

Once he’s in the peach, it’s pretty fun and whimsical, as one would hope for a book about hanging out on a giant peach with a bunch of giant bugs.

The movie is weird and mostly not good. Some fun visuals, but there is some major free styling on the plot that didn’t work for me (unexplained mechanical shark, out of nowhere ghost pirates, etc.). Leo liked it a lot, but I kept quietly muttering, “wow this is…not good.”

It’s not an objectionable movie, and kids will get a kick out of it as long as nothing spooks them, it just didn’t work for me. And yes, I know I’m not the target audience.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: This one is jollier than most others, partly because the bad guys are just the other kids (Willy Wonka is a friendly nut case), and they’re just characters that represent what were apparently Roald Dahl’s four deadly sins of childhood: gluttony, spoiled-ness, TV obsession, and gum chewing.

Charlie is quite destitute at the beginning, but it didn’t feel as miserable as the opening of James. He’s poor, but he also gets to splurge on a chocolate bar once in a while, and he has a nice relationship with his parents and grandparents, so he doesn’t feel miserable in the way James does.

And, yeah, there’s the whole Oompa Loompa thing. The Oompa Loompas are a race of very short people who live on an island where they are tormented by some kind of large predator. They are so much happier now that they work on Wonka’s factory. Basically, there’s a two-page white savior story in the middle of the book somewhere. You can probably breeze over it and skip enough to make it less problematic if you’re reading aloud. Or, of course, you can have a chat about how sometimes people make assumptions about other cultures that don’t always turn out to be true.

That narrative doesn’t occupy a lot of space in the book (though the Oompa Loompas show up periodically to sing a song), but you’ll want to be prepared for that one.

The Gene Wilder movie holds up as a whimsical romp, especially because Wilder takes the character in an unexpected direction. Dahl, who wrote the script, apparently didn’t like the performance, and it’s fun to try to imagine what the writer had in mind when he wrote Wonka’s dialogue. Presumably Dahl was imagining an adoring character who gave a crap about the kids’ safety, while Wilder is practically nudging them into the disasters that befall them. He somehow pulls off being a mischievous lunatic without being mean-spirited. It’s a brilliant performance off of what could have been a really saccharine script.

I don’t really remember the Johnny Depp version, but no one seems to like it.

I also haven’t revisited the sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, in many years, but it is WEIRD. A lot of it takes place in space, where the group is tormented by evil space squid things called Vermicious Knids. At one point, one of Charlie’s grandparent’s eats too many reverse aging pills and they have to go into negative-age-land to save her. I’m not trying to warn you off of it, just don’t expect another whimsical trot through candy-based scenarios.

Esio Trot: Charming, pretty short, but the main character’s ethics are questionable at best.

The plot: A sweet but shy man woos his downstairs neighbor who he is madly in love with by claiming that he can make her turtle grow larger (cause, y’know, who doesn’t want a larger turtle), but he actually just swaps it out for a succession of larger turtles. Despite being obsessed with her turtle, the woman never notices that it’s actually like six different turtles over the course of a month or two. They fall in love and get married, and he never tells her.

Otherwise, it’s a sweet and silly romantic comedy with lots of turtles.

The Enormous Crocodile: This one is short, easily doable in one sitting, and it’s fine as long as your kid can handle a villainous crocodile who is trying to eat kids. The other jungle creatures are horrified, and repeatedly stop the croc moments before it’s going to succeed. The bad guy is disposed of in the end when an elephant flings it into the sun. It’s not exactly an important part of the children’s canon but most kids can handle and enjoy it.

Be warned that it takes place in Africa, but the humans in it are mostly white. There are Black people in it too, but it kind of feels caught in between not wanting to challenge the 80s status quo of books being about white people, while also taking place in an area native to crocodiles.

The Minpins: I’m not sure if I’ve ever met another person who has heard of the Minpins. But it’s kind of awesome. It’s one of his later ones, and is more solemn and conventionally beautiful than his others.

The story in brief: a boy sneaks into the forest that he’s never supposed to go to, because he thinks all the scary stories are no more than that. He quickly encounters a giant monster (who we never really see), escapes by climbing up a tree, and meets an entire society of very small tree people. They conspire to rid themselves of the monster (spoiler alert: they succeed). It doesn’t get too scary, and once you’re through the initial monster encounter, the rest of it is pretty tame. There’s also a lovely epilogue where he flies around on a swan.

I don’t know if there’s a Quentin Blake version, but my copy has large, beautiful illustrations that give the book a more magical, majestic feel than Blake’s. If you didn’t check the author’s name, you would never know it was a Roald Dahl book.