Reap your fantasies. Review on Collected Stories ofRoald Dahl, The - Roald Dahl

Mommy you are a wondercrump and now will ya please get me my scrumdiddlyumptious food, my stomach is crucifyingly longing for some grumpy scrumpy things to munch. Wow isn’t that one sentence enough to curdle up the anorexia ridden gray cells that you might have been gifted at the time of your inception into this unrelentlessly swelling mass called earth’s populace? Phew I could not think of any better way to start talking about this man who arguably is one of the best short story tellers that we have had.

Without much ado, ladies and gentlemen let me present to you Roald Dahl and today through this review I am going to talk about his story telling techniques and some of his well known works. Well pardon me if I am not sticking to the topic of the review per se but its tough to write on this man in the boundaries of just one book.

Addictive and gluey, his tales run a vein of macabre malevolence and they are more effective because it springs from slight, almost inconsequential everyday things. The result is black humor of the most sophisticated kind. These stories pack their punch, the comeuppance at the end is often relishingly moral as in “ the bookseller”, where a bookseller scam involving the extortion of cash from rich widows through fake invoices for risqué books comes to a lovely sharp end. But this repeated serving diet of villains never quite softens the hard-boiled, even cynical stain in Dahl’s vision of humanity and it’s that ruthless unsentimentalism that is Dahl’s greatest addiction. His stories have unexpected endings and strange, menacing atmosphere.

His books are mostly fantasy and full of imagination, they are always a little cruel but never without humor, a thrilling mixture of the grotesque and comic one feels. He not only wrote stories for the grown up but also for children. One feels some of his best stories and works have come when his audience is children for here pun, jugglery of words and neologism takes center stage. He was a master when it comes to playing with words and coming up with the bizzarest of words. Consider some like “clambered, chirruped, rasped, swishfiggler, snozzcumber, Vermicious Knids”.

Disguised and diametric is one frequent motif in most of his works. People are more often then not what they appear to be. Mary Maloney in ''Lamb to the Slaughter'', for example, is not a friendly widow, but a clever murderess. The background in his stories is agonizingly close to reality and that’s what heightens the drama and appeal of his works. One of his teachers once remarked, ''I have never met anybody who so persistently writes words meaning the exact opposite of what is intended.'' He had an uncanny knack of disguising plots, subplots, characters and their intentions, he was a master of subterfuge or something which someone like Jeffrey Archer would call The red herring

Imaginative and avant-garde he sure was. In most of his writings for the adults the emphasis was on imaginative plots. For instance officers who in vain search for the murder weapon eat in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the evidence of a murder, a frozen leg of lamb. Uncle Oswald, a seducer from 'The Visitor', gets seduced. In 'Parson's Pleasure' an antique dealer tastes his own medicine and the Twits from ‘The Twits’ use glue to catch birds and meet their own gluey ends. He wrote stories, which suited to all palate, and he has a witty take on any glum situation.

A child’s chum he was and while he wrote the stories it seemed as if he were telling a story aloud to the kids. The tone is conversational, confiding, and funny, with a liberal sprinkling of exclamation points and PHRASES WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. It’s as if the sentences came embedded with their own stage directions something like “Winnie the Pooh” and “Alice in Wonderland,” In a Dahl book, you are never out of earshot of a sly authorial voice that is sharing a secret joke about a character—or is announcing that it’s about to yank you out of a scene that’s becoming a bit too gross or distressing. About his children’s stories he said once: “ I make my points by exaggerating wildly. That’s the only way to get through to children. ” “Parents and schoolteachers are the enemy,” Dahl once said. “The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all.”

Unconventionality is thy name, he excelled in plots, subplots and stories which were unconventional. His protagonists like Charlie, James, and Matilda are timid characters who nevertheless succeed. He reveled in the creation of imaginative worlds like the Chocolate Factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, in that sense one might liken her to Harry Potter’s JK Rowling.

The omnibus contains stories from books like Kiss Kiss, Over to You, Switch Bitch and Someone like you, apart from other collected stories of his. Some of the noteworthy stories in this collection are The Landlady, William and Mary, Royal Jelly, Madam Rosette, The Bookseller, Lamb to the slaughter, The Great automatic grammatizer, Beware of the dog, The last act, The hitchhiker among others. It comes across as a delightful read at once, one, which can be enjoyed at any given time of the day by people of any age group. His brilliance lies in the fact that he doesn’t write stories, which are taxing to comprehend, and he can always be enjoyed when one is looking for a refreshing change for a daily routine.

Questions

Who has been the best short story teller according to you and why?

Compare PG Woodhouse, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Roald Dahl and their conflicting styles of story telling.

Which is your favorite Dahl story and what was most striking about the story that you found?

P.S. Check out my next write up on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his works