Celebrating Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl Day – 13 September – is about celebrating all we love about the great author, relishing the stories that have given so much joy to so many for over 60 years. Adored equally for his wicked characters and cherished heroes, Dahl remains one of the best-known and most-loved children’s authors of all time. His endurance is remarkable, but as the rhetoric around Dahl shifts, is it time to ask questions?

Uncomfortable as it feels to call into question such a literary hero, controversy around the author has grown – not just in relation to his politics, but also in terms of his cannon.

• Is it ok for children’s books to contain such frightening, cruel, unapologetic characters?
• Is the lack of redemption or reflection for said characters sending young readers a skewed message about right and wrong – or perhaps more importantly, how to right a wrong?
• Do story endings need to provide clearer, better, more morally robust resolutions to the problems they present?
• Is it right to allow such character stereotypes to go unchallenged?

Because, while some of Dahl’s characters reform (think Mr and Mrs Gregg in The Magic Finger), many are just removed from society, obliterated in some way. The Grand High Witch becomes a rat and is squished at the end of The Witches, Mr and Mrs Wormwood emigrate to Spain in Matilda, Mrs Trunchbull simply “vanishes” – vacating the school and her house, even the Enormous Crocodile is not taught the error of his ways, but instead is thrown into space where he explodes.

But, as we try to teach children that there are no “bad” people, just bad choices or in some cases bad behaviour, there’s something uncomfortable about the simplicity of just putting characters in a ”bad” box and then getting rid of the box at the end. It’s reminiscent of many fairy tales – the wolf in The Three Little Pigs is boiled to death, the witch in Hansel and Gretel is pushed into an oven, and the evil queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is forced to dance to death in red hot iron slippers.

And just like those fairy tales, Dahl makes no attempt to redeem his “bad” characters, and there’s no expectation for them to recognize or acknowledge their actions. So as we tell children that it’s their ability to repair mistakes that matters – Roald Dahl’s “baddies” make no apology.

In fact, Dahl leans in to the gruesome, creating something quite horrifying. Like all good fairy tales there’s a clear link between characters’ physicality and their MO. Heroes are petite, attractive, well-spoken, unassuming (this is true of Matilda, Miss Honey, Danny, Charlie, James, Sophie…) and in contrast, the baddies are wretched both inside and out. You only have to think of The Grand High Witch’s “foul and putrid and decayed” face “rotting away at the edges” to be disgusted, but somehow deliciously so.

Dahl delights in the grotesque, and readers are permitted – indeed encouraged – to despise. He makes it easy, and fun, to hate the baddies and to celebrate their (often gruesome) demise. In making the characters so identifiable – heroes are good through and through, baddies are rotten to the core – Dahl removes the conflict that is present in more complex character portraits. We are let off the hook of having to challenge the stereotypes we meet. Our instincts are right – the baddies are just bad, and that is not just straightforward, but somehow reassuring.

There are no mixed messages, little to interpret or make sense of, and no expectation on the reader for sympathy or empathy. In a world where children are encouraged to understand, tolerate and accept each other – to refrain from judgement, Dahl’s world is quite the opposite. We don’t have to understand why Mr and Mrs Wormwood are so unkind to their daughter, why the Grand High Witch is so vicious, or what motivates Miss Trunchbull…we are permitted to see them for what they are – nothing more. And while some of the characters are uncomfortable – we don’t really have to confront them, they are ultimately eradicated. It’s deliciously simple and undemanding.

Further, by making that fairy-tale premise a little more concrete – Dahl’s heroes and villains aren’t presented as fantasy figures, but as “real”, “normal” people you might easily encounter (or worse still, have encountered) – he makes them just enough recognizable so as to convince us that it’s not a fairy tale. And while there is risk and jeopardy, often frighteningly familiar, it is gone by the time the book is finished. The impression – along with palpable relief – is that not only is evil nearly always hideously unambiguous, but it’s also possible for it to be vanquished forever.

Happy endings are achievable after all!

Dahl offers us fairy-tale fantasies that are just on the right side of plausible to feel tangible. They don’t require too much from us, and provide a brief escape from real- world contradictions and expectations. In a world mired with complexity, horror and fear, perhaps that’s reason enough for celebration.