Roald Dahl is one of those rare authors whose appeal spans the spectrum of young to old - perhaps appealing to the young in the old, certainly appealing to that perverse delight we all take in extraordinary adventures, full of sick and twisted episodes.
Few people of any age can resist at least a smirk when an unbearable brat like Mike TV shrinks to the size of a kernal of corn in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There isn't much in children's literature to compare to the evilness of Aunt Spike and Aunt Sponge in James and the Giant Peach, nor the awful deeds of The Witches. Then there's the manic nastiness of so many of his animal creations. Roald Dahl was a master of descriptions and details which captivate minds and set bodies squirming from head to toe. Pre-teen readers can count on him as a creepy sort of ally.
By the time of his death in 1990 at the age of 74, he'd written 19 children's books, most of them always among the kids' best-sellers. The key to his success he said, was to conspire with children against adults. "It is the path to their affections," Dahl said in an interview in a British newspaper, the Independent, not long before he died. Far from contriving moralistic tales to manipulate the kids into mum and dad's good graces, his stories were based on a belief that, as shown so clearly in Matilda, "parents and schoolteachers are the enemy".
He wasn't sentimental about children themselves either. The reason adults were children's greatest enemy, he said, was "because of the awful process of civilising this thing that, when it is born, is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all". And his books abound with uncivilised children who meet disgusting fates. Disgusting, in fact, is pretty much the order of the day with Dahl. Brilliantly disgusting.
Anyone who has watched (or been) a child absorbed in a bit of worm dissection or bee decapitation for hours on end couldn't fail to accept Dahl's theory of children as lovers of the vile, but he was reluctant to discuss the source of his inspiration. "My ideas occur basically at my desk," he used to say. He might on occasion refer to superficial sources, such as the time he met writer Ian Fleming - author of the James Bond novels as well as children's books such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - at a dinner party and joked about the toughness of the lamb; later Dahl wrote Lamb to the Slaughter, the story of a woman who beat her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, cooked the lamb and served it to detectives who were in the house looking for the murder weapon.
There has always been a lot of speculation that his own war injuries were the source of much of his fascination with the macabre. As a member of the Royal Air Force during the second World War, he crash-landed his biplane in the Libyan desert and suffered a fractured skull, spinal injuries and a smashed hip. Apparently, after surgeons had removed the end of his femur, Dahl preserved the bit of bone and used it as a paperweight in his writing studio.
Despite his popularity, Dahl's work has - probably not surprisingly - been denounced on occasion as ugly, anti-social, brutish and anti-feminist. It may be some of these things, but so is life; perhaps his work, subversive and irreverent, is a lot more honest than your average romp through beach caves with Enid Blyton. However, wherever you stand on the Dahl debate, sales speak volumes - and keeping the books low on moral didactics seems to be popular with the target audience.
