The late writer, whose best-known book is now an opera, earned success as a children's author through his gift for subverting reality from the knee-high perspective of his fans, writes Sara Keating
ROALD DAHL’S books belong to the witching hour, that special moment, right before bedtime, when children get lost in dark and grotesque worlds of their imaginations. With their vivid characters and marvellous invention, Dahl’s 16 books and three collections of poetry for children have provided night-time inspiration for children for almost half a century. Dahl believed his duty was the “business of remembering what it was like to be young”, and his ability to see the world from a knee-high perspective is the reason why his books are so popular with children.
In the Dahlian universe adults are revealed as the giants they are: impetuous and unimaginative and sometimes cruel, but justly punished for their stupidity. Farting is funny, the logic of language is weird and random, and the rules of life are inconsistent and unfair.
Before you even read a word of Dahl, his books make a dramatic impression on the soon-to-be reader. Most of Dahl’s work, even the longer novels for older readers, feature Quentin Blake’s illustrations. In spite of their artistry, these enlivening drawings are comfortingly familiar to children slowly mastering their own artistic skills. The colours bleed a little over the lines and are unnaturally intense – skin is piggy-pink or milk-chocolate brown, as if Blake had only pastels to work with – while characters’ physicalities determine their personalities.
Recognisable types develop: snotty children have upturned noses, pressed so tight against their faces that you can see inside their nostrils; wicked queens have hairy chins. "If a person has ugly thoughts," Dahl wrote in The Twits, his grotesque tale of a bird-eating, monkey-capturing married pair, "it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until it gets so ugly you can hardly bear to look at it . . . but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely." Blake's illustrations perfectly embody that moral lesson.
It is a common theory that fairy tales give children a safe space to explore their fears in. Dahl's books work as miniature morality tales: ugly sisters never get off scot-free, and brats will always be punished for their misdemeanours. "In fairy tales, witches always wear silly black hats and black cloaks and they ride on broom-sticks," The Witchesopens. Dahl has no time for such fantasies when there are more dangerous threats from the real world to be grappled with: the child-eating witches that the orphaned protagonist battles with – and of course overcomes. Dahl's rewriting of classic fairy tales in Revolting Rhymesprovides them with a funny twist that is also less fantastical and more in line with the workings of the real world. "I guess you think you know this story. You don't; the real one's much more gory," he writes. Cinderella spurns the idiotic prince and marries a jam-maker instead, Goldilocks is exposed as a "brazen little crook" and Red Riding Hood "whips a pistol from her knickers" in self-protection and shoots the wolf stone dead.
Dahl believed the only way to make characters interesting to children is to exaggerate all their good and bad qualities, “and so if a person is nasty or bad or cruel you make them very nasty . . . That I think is fun and makes an impact.” And his stories abound with such personalities. Apart from his re-interpretation of familiar fairy tale heroes in new ways, think of the teachers Miss Trunchbull and Miss Honey in Matilda. As if the names don’t say it all about these larger-than-life rivals, Miss Trunchbull is “a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of children and parents alike”, while Miss Honey has “a warmth that was also tangible”. “Tangible”? In a children’s book? Why not?
Other vocabulary-expanding words are scattered through Dahl's books, whose joy lies in their constantly surprising wordsmithery. A passionate believer in the importance of reading, Dahl provided a new lexicon for the imagination while encouraging readers to experiment with language. Particularly in The BFG, the tale of a big friendly giant's friendship with Sophie, a small human bean, Dahl celebrates the multiplicity of language in puns and new coinage. We would call it wordplay; typically, the BFG calls it babblement.
Dahl applies babblement to his invention of beings and beasts: the Oompa-Loompas from Loompaland, and the hornswogglers and snozzwangers and whangdoodles that appear in several books. He also applies it to the illogical semantic games of real words. In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example, Willy Wonka's playful logic exposes the licences that language can take. "Whipped cream isn't whipped cream at all if it hasn't been whipped with whips, just like poached eggs isn't poached eggs unless it's been stolen in the dead of the night."
But Dahl is perhaps most creative with sweets, which he treats as if they were gold. Dahl was addicted to chocolate. On his writing desk he kept a large silver ball made from chocolate wrappers he collected when he was a boy. In the grubbers, or sweet shops, in The Giraffe and the Pelly and Meand Charlie and the Chocolate Factorywe are treated to Gumtwizzlers and Fizzwinkles, Frothblowers and Spitsizzlers, Liplickers and Plushnuggets and Everlasting Gobstoppers, sweets whose sounds embody sensation and stimulate the taste buds as well as the imagination.
"The greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places," Dahl wrote in his final book, The Minpins, which was published after his death. "Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." The greatest secrets of a wondrous magical world are to be found in Dahl's endlessly surprising and always subversive universe.
Wexford opera: 'The Golden Ticket'
Charlie and the Chocolate Factoryis one of Dahl's best-loved books, largely thanks to the 1973 film version, which brought Charlie Bucket's journey into the Wonka factory so vividly to life. It is a brilliantly visual book, full of the rich colours and strange shapes that inspire the upside-down world of pure imagination that Wonka has created.
It is also an aural fantasy. The Oompa-Loompas – “one hundred of them singing together” – provide a choral chant about the fate of greedy blighters like Veruca Salt and Mike Teavee, while the burping and gurgling and glooping of machines provides a soundtrack to Charlie’s journey through Wonkaland.
Inspired by this sonic potential, Wexford Festival Opera and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis are staging Peter Ash’s playful score for an opera based on Charlie’s adventures.
The Golden Ticketfeatures a libretto by Donald Sturrock that captures the humour and fantasy at the heart of Dahl's tale. It promises to bring opera to a young audience in an adventurous way, with "wondrous music" that "sends shivers down your spindels", as the BFG would say.
The Golden Ticket is on as part of Wexford Festival Opera tomorrow, next Wednesday and Saturday, and on October 26th and 29th; wexfordopera.com
