There are too many good writers for me to keep track of so, mostly for the sake of convenience, I categorize them: Koontz writes thrillers, Franzen does literature, King fills the world with horror, Snickett delights children.
The problem is that this pigeon-hole system, though it works with some authors, it woefully misrepresents others to the point of exclusion. The thought goes something like this: I don’t need to read Roald Dahl, he’s a children’s author.
Well, in this season of gifting I received a collection of Dahl’s shorts. I gave the book the once over and saw, in the excerpted blurbs from past reviewers, words like “lust” “wicked” “nasty” “grotesque” and “horrific.” And this guy wrote Matilda? I thought, and I read the first story which was, along with all the rest, exceptional.
Naturally, the same imagination that brought us James and his peach and Charlie and his chocolate is hardly contained in Dahl’s shorts. There are humans turning into bees, witches specializing in taxidermy, men sleeping with each other’s wives without their (the wives) notice, and a vegetarian boy slaughtered in a New York pig butchery as if he were a hog himself. Dahl’s stories are the adult versions of those we read as children, not children’s stories that are just so good they appeal to readers of all ages (like Harry Potter). There’s sex with lepers, a throat slit ear to ear, high-school beatings, and a hopeful account of Adlof Hitler’s birth.
But Dahl is more than just imaginative, his stories are masterful manipulations of the form itself. Each story moves swiftly but intentionally towards a climax (an appropriate word) that the reader can anticipate without fully guessing. Dahl was clearly a writer who composed the entire plot in his head and then wrote it out, rather than scribbling away and letting the story unfold.
Importantly, Dahl never uses stupid characters to develop a twisted plot. In fact, what makes the stories great is that the protagonists trust themselves with a self-assurance that makes them vulnerable in a familiar way. Again and again, characters go with their trusted instincts only to find that a lack of foresight has led them dangerously astray. Dahl’s protagonists trust themselves so entirely you can count on their failure. There is no sympathy for the inexperienced, no net to catch the misstep of ambition.
Which is, of course, delicious.
Though each protagonist is clever and usually shrewd, they all have something that’s a little off—some obsession or naivety that makes them slightly unpalatable. Alongside admirable resourcefulness, Dahl locates the unattractive human propensity for selfish gratification which makes the moments of reckoning—moments sure to come—so exciting. Almost every story sets the stage for immense yet justified suffering and ends just as the vindictive root of a character’s punishment-to-come becomes clear. There’s a guilty, almost sickening sense of satisfaction for the reader who can take pleasure in such wickedness. The stories are grotesque but Dahl gives us the unique pleasure of watching the carnage without getting our fingers too sticky, something that perhaps only a “child’s” author can do.
