Dahl, Nikolajeva believes, “is one of the most colourful and light-hearted children’s writers”. But for all the funniness and dazzling linguistic acrobatics of his prose, she acknowledges that there are problems with his vision. Consider Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. “Wonka is vegetarian and only eats healthy food, but he seduces children with sweets. It’s highly immoral,” she says. And then there’s The Witches, whose child narrator, having been turned into a mouse, decides against returning to his human form because he dreads outliving his beloved grandmother. He’d rather die with her, as his abbreviated rodent lifespan will guarantee. “This is a denial of growing up and mortality, but mortality is one of the aspects that makes us human,” Nikolajeva points out. “To tell young readers that you can escape growing up by dying is dubious – drawn to the utmost, an encouragement of suicide – and therefore both an ideological and an aesthetic flaw”.
Darkness, for want of a better word, has forever been a secret – and not so secret – ingredient in children’s literature, whether it’s tales by the Brothers Grimm and Heinrich Hoffmann, or Lord of the Flies and The Hunger Games. If you’ve ever paid attention to the words of a nursery rhyme like Ring a Ring o’ Roses or Oranges and Lemons, you’ll know that suckling babes are reared on the stuff – and with good reason. As child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim explained in his seminal study, The Uses of Enchantment, the macabre in children’s literature serves an important cathartic function. “Without such fantasies, the child fails to get to know his monster better, nor is he given suggestions as to how he may gain mastery over it. As a result, the child remains helpless with his worst anxieties – much more so than if he had been told fairy tales which give these anxieties form and body and also show ways to overcome these monsters,” he wrote.
Light and shade
It’s not hard to see where Dahl might have drawn his own darkness from. Having lost his older sister and father when he was three years old (his sister to appendicitis, his father to pneumonia), he was packed off to boarding school aged just nine. The first volume of his memoirs, Boy, recalls in great detail the headmaster’s penchant for floggings so vicious they drew blood.
As a young RAF pilot in World War Two, Dahl came close to dying. Invalided out after crash landing in the Western Desert, he subsequently spent time in the US, seducing heiresses and wealthy widows in the name of counterintelligence. His long first marriage, to the actress and celebrated beauty Patricia Neal, had far from a storybook ending. The couple lost their eldest daughter to illness, and their only son was left brain-damaged by a traffic accident. A few years later, Neal herself suffered a series of strokes while pregnant with their fifth child. Relearning how to speak in recovery, she would come out with language that inspired the BFG’s lexicon.
