Roald Dahl’s father and younger sister died when he was young.  The schoolmasters in the UK under which he received his tutelage were not immune from corporal punishment with the use of a cane.  Perhaps this is where we learn of Dahl’s unique association of parents and their world with something distasteful, cruel and evil juxtaposed with the child’s world of innocence, imagination, and escapism.  He began writing following his decorated service as a Royal Air-Force pilot in WWII.

Dahl gives paints images in words of two worlds that give us a sense that as we get older we get corrupted by modern life and lose that childhood innocence and playfulness that is the source of human hope.  Dahl gives us characterizations of the seven deadly sins and eight deadly thoughts in the Christian tradition frequently as we can see in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  It is clear that selfishness and cruelty among children finds its source in the parents that raise them to be successful and popular adults.  Here, we learn that this is not what being a kid is all about.  His book The BFG gives a different spin on this role confusion by pitting a friendly giant who befriends a child against the wicked and cruel giants with whom he is affiliated.

What we learn is that childhood is not something limited to children and that the cruel and evil behaviors of adults can be transferred to their children who are not aware of the difference.  the message is not so much “Don’t be like them” as much as “See how they are?  Do be like that.”  But rather than belabor us with such transparent lessons, Dahl makes the distinction between good and evil behavior clear.

He does this with a characteristic darkness and an almost gleeful exploration of cruelty that is loaded with off-beat dark humor and irony.  Take the grandparents in George’s Marvelous Medicine.  After reading what punishment she would give George in the form of what he would eat, I could never look at earwigs the same way, and still do not.  I am always taken back to the indelible impression and fantastic wit that Dahl left on me with such visceral and salient pictures of a reality that was distant, but somehow close to home.

I read these books too many time to enumerate as a child.  I will have each of them on tap for my kids as well.  They have a different kind of imaginative framework that took me perhaps from the often cruel surrounds of my own childhood, to a place with George, or James, or Charlie that reminded me that with my own imagination, I could make the world what I wanted it to be in spite of reality.  More than C.S. Lewis, Dahl taught me what good and bad behavior was all about and how if we are not careful, our very human nature as children with hope and promise in the world can be crushed by the whims and jaded values of modernity.

Am I right.  Or left?

This post is part of a blogging summit called by John Hobbins @ Ancient Hebrew Poetry.