The Cold-Blooded Cruelty Of Roald Dahl

Will Self, writing in the UK Guardian, reviews the Wes Anderson-directed Fantastic Mr Fox, and essays, wonderfully, on its author, Roald Dahl :

The Twits is my favourite Dahl book....The celebrated midden of Mr Twit's beard, his insertion of his glass eye into Mrs Twit's beer, her substitution of worms for his spaghetti – not forgetting the dreaded shrinks; indeed, all of the creepy mind games the ghastly duo engage in...

That the whole tale of spousal, child and animal abuse should be punctuated by lines that skilfully and inexorably tighten the dramatic noose is testimony to Dahl's genius as a fashioner of narrative, when the aside comes: "We can't go on for ever watching these two disgusting people doing disgusting things to each other." The only possible reply is: "Yes, we can – please, more!"

Dahl mimicked to perfection a believable child's-eye view, that, looking up from below, sees the adult realm as foreshortened, and adult foibles as grossly elongated.

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Take Dahl's most famous work, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: its boy protagonist's family is immiserated, his carers are incapable of looking even after themselves – so salvation comes through luck, and the arbitrary beneficence of a deranged feudal-capitalist with a happily mancipated workforce. Of course, the spur that initially drives Charlie on is a lust for sweet things that, were it transferred to an adult plane, could only result in a work entitled something like "Charlie and the Huge Seraglio full of Compliant Nymphomaniacs". The NAACP slated the black pygmy Oompa-Loompas in the original text – and so Dahl changed them to a fictional light-skinned subspecies – but he couldn't get rid of the brown sugar. My equation of sweets with sex is not facetious; in Dahl-world, oral gratification is pretty much the only thing that matters.

The misogyny that haunts Dahl's adult writing is also short-circuited in his sexless children's fiction, for here his heroes and heroines can be either orphans (the aforementioned Charlie, James of giant-peach lusting), or else, as in The Magic Finger, an unnamed, and thus family-free, eight-year-old girl. The eponymous heroine of Matilda has parents who are neglectful to the point of being abusive. Sophie in The BFG is extracted from her natal home in order to experience good and bad surrogacy – from giants (ie Dahlesquely huge men). The infanticidal witches of The Witches stand proxy for all mothers – who kill that which they claim to love; true, the boy's Norwegian grandmother is a good enough parent, but then she's safely de-sexed by age and illness. Only Danny, the Champion of the World presents an idealised parent – and that, also, has to be a man.

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I don't adore Dahl's children's fiction in spite of its submerged misogyny, lust, revanchism and wilful neglect of identity politics – I love it precisely because of these attributes. Dahl understood intuitively the truth best exemplified by a famous scene in The Simpsons, when Bart overhears Marge saying to Homer "Kids can be so cruel" and, taking it as an injunction, cries out: "We can? Thanks Mom!" There then comes the sound of his rapid footsteps along the hall, followed by Lisa's pained cry: "Owwww! Bart, cut it out!" Dahl's books resound down through the generations with the demented call "We can!" and its pained response "Owwww!"

And long may they do so.

The Full Essay By Will Self Is Here