The Very Marvellous and Talented Roald Dahl
Matilda
This book came out in 1988, but I still swallowed it whole. It is so funny with Miss Trunchbull hammer-throwing children by their plaits through windows and Matilda’s thrilling combination of intelligence, coolness under pressure and flair for the dramatic. So much power concentrated in one tiny mind.
It was the last full-length children’s book Dahl wrote and he seems to have given himself permission to put a little bit more heart in it than he had done in anything since The BFG.
The Enormous Crocodile
The enormous crocodile has but one thought on its mind: to eat as many children as he can via the adoption of various, not-quite-impenetrable disguises. One for the very youngest readers, and I can say no more without creating infant spoilers, a low to which I will not stoop.
Fantastic Mr Fox
When kids are a very little bit older, they can move on to this immensely satisfying story of Boggis, Bunce, Bean, a host of fat chickens and a display of reynardian trickery as old as time.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Born of Dahl’s famous and enduring love of chocolate, this is an unfairytale for our times. Its elemental simplicity – a poor but honest hero and four ambulant essences of the greatest juvenile vices who are justly rewarded and punished during their chocolate factory odyssey – made it a bestseller from the moment it was published, over 50 years ago.
The BFG’s “scrumdiddlyumptious” may just have made it into the OED, but a Golden Ticket has long been a byword for any access-all-areas pass, while Willy Wonka is shorthand for any mercurial, mesmeric figure or creator of some barely believable breakthrough.
Charlie is many children’s first introduction to Dahl. He takes you by the hand and leads you – as firmly as Willy Wonka does Charlie – into an edifice of delights.
James and the Giant Peach
Dahl’s first book for children. He had already made a name as a writer of macabre short stories for adults but his astute agent Sheila St Lawrence felt there was something shifting around in there for children and kept encouraging him to find it. She was right. James’s parents are eaten by an escaped rhinoceros (“in full daylight, mind you, and on a crowded street”) on the second page and we’re away.
The Witches
A favourite with Dahl’s critics because it offers the most fertile ground in which to plant the charges of misogyny that periodically came his way. (We’ll argue about their legitimacy some non-centenary celebrating day. For what it’s worth, I think of him as an alpha-male misanthrope and love him for it.)
This is a favourite with children because it’s the perfect story of right in the form of a hero (turned into a mouse by bald, blue-spittled witches) and his beloved grandmother winning out over might. It also contains the quintessential Dahl happy ending. The hero realises that as a mouse he has a much shorter lifespan than he would as a boy and thus his grandmother and he are likely to die together. An altogether bracing read.
The BFG
It’s fast, funny and furiously charming. If Willy Wonka was Dahl’s younger, harder secret self, the BFG is his older, more avuncular avatar. He is a maker of dreams who spirits the heroine Sophie (named after his granddaughter - the book is dedicated to her, too) away when she spies him at his nightly work and together they save the world’s children from “human bean”-eating giants.
When Quentin Blake came to illustrate the book, he couldn’t work out what the BFG should wear on his feet. He consulted Dahl. Through the post a few days later came one of Dahl’s own huge, battered Norwegian leather sandals. And those are what the BFG wears.
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