The Witches by Roald Dahl

“It doesn't matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.”

When I searched for quotes from The Witches, the above was by far the most popular. I find this pretty amusing considering that most children who read Dahl’s creepy tale will probably remember the first half, where children are drowned, poisoned transformed and sometimes just vanished by a world-wide cabal of mostly unidentifiable witches. It’s certainly the part of the book that stuck with me the most. Dahl has a knack for crafting disturbing grotesqueries without being explicit, and he’s at his best in the first half of The Witches.

The story is simple: a young boy, never named, is told stories about witches by his grandmother. In Dahl’s mythology, witches have only one objective: destroy all children, by any means possible. Unfortunately for our nameless hero, the boy and his grandmother end up at a hotel that just happens to be hosting the annual gathering of all the witches in England. The boy ends up captured by the witches and used as a test case for the witches’ newest plan: turning all the children in the world into mice.

The story does two things at this point. First, up until the boy’s transformation, The Witches is mostly a creepy slow-burn; afterward, it becomes more of a traditional adventure story as the boy attempts, in mouse-form, to turn the witches’ mouse-making potion on them. Dahl is just fine at writing action, but it’s not his primary strength, and the last third of the book suffers as a result.

The second, and most notable, thing about the last section, however, is the way it inverts expectations about the boy’s eventual fate. Normally, in a story like this, the boy would be turned back into, well, a boy. Not so here. Instead, he is told by his grandmother that, as a human-mouse, he will likely live only nine more years. To which he responds, “Good! That’s great! That’s the best news I ever had!” Because he doesn’t want to live longer than his grandma, you see.

I guess the ending is triumphant--the implication is that mouse and grandma will soon eliminate every witch in the world--but it’s hard to feel super happy about the kid spending the rest of his abbreviated life as a rodent. Whatever.

Matilda by Roald Dahl

Ah, 2012. A new year in which to start strong and eventually fall off on my reviews. Last year, I didn't review over half of my books, and I'm regretting that now, since that means there is no review of The BFG, my literary introduction to the bizarre and sometimes cruel world of Roald Dahl.

Dahl's universe operates in extremes, largely populated by grotesques and beauties. Matilda's ignorant, crooked family and the kid-hating, shotputting teacher Ms Trunchbull fall in the former category, while Matilda and her teacher Ms Honey fall in the latter--but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Matilda is an extremely precocious little girl, growing up in a family that doesn't value intelligence and force-feeds television to her 24 hours a day (and, as an aside, Dahl apparently REALLY hated TV, to judge from this and Mike Teevee in Willy Wonka). Matilda, four, seeks asylum in books, and by the time she starts school, has read all sorts of things--Dickens, Steinbeck, Hemingway, C.S. Lewis. When she finally goes to school, she finds a sympathizer in the saintly-but-weak Ms. Honey, and an antagonizer in the cruel, abusive Ms. Trumbull.

Dahl presents Ms. Trumbull as an exaggerated monster who picks children up by their hair and hurls them out windows, but in spite of her absurdity, Ms. Trumbull is a wonderfully dark, wicked creation--entirely unambiguous and virtually unassailable. As Matilda says, when asked why parents never complain:

"Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable. No parent is going to believe this pigtail story, not in a million years. Mine wouldn't. They'd call me a liar."

Spoilers.

Matilda eventually discovers that she has special powers, never given a name in the book but which are clearly some form of telekinesis, and, using them, she's able to overthrow Ms. Trumbull, help Ms. Honey and, eventually, even find a new family. It's childish wish fulfillment, but it's handled in such a way that any child would relate to--surely everyone reading this has tried moving something simply by staring at it, and, on an even more universal level, every person feels that they are special in ways that those around them don't understand, a theme also present in The BFG and Willy Wonka. Matilda's victory may come by supernatural means, but the scaffolding upon which it is built is natural and universal.

p.s. Quentin Blake's illustrations, both in this and The BFG are fantastic and perfectly established Dahl's mood before I read a word.