courtesy of Lorraine Goddard
The Wonderful Story of Sophie Dahl
the granddaughter of an icon makes her literary debut
Print“The brilliant thing is, having written a first novel, I never have to again,” Sophie Dahl says to me during our phone interview.
It’s not unusual for first-time novelists to reflect with relief on the nerve-wracking process of exposing their debuts to the public—but Dahl, the granddaughter of beloved children’s author Roald Dahl, knows her book will come under particular scrutiny. Luckily, Playing With the Grown-ups earned good marks from the Los Angeles Times and BookPage when it was released last month, though Dahl still likens the experience to a “baptism by fire.”
You can’t really blame her. Roald Dahl is a literary icon, one of the greatest children’s authors of all time—if you haven’t at least heard of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Matilda, you were probably raised in Antarctica. Odds are that you’ve not only read one of his books, but that his bizarre and powerful characters made an everlasting impression on your young heart.
Dahl seems to have inherited her granddad’s knack for inventing plausibly quirky adults—but unlike most such characters spun by the older Dahl, her most successful creation is female. Marina, the restless mother of a teenaged protagonist named Kitty, is the highlight of Playing With the Grown-ups. As she subjects Kitty to the sometimes exciting, sometimes painful adventures that pull the plot along, Marina shares many of the qualities that make classic Roald Dahl characters like Willy Wonka and Uncle Oswald so effective. Genetic proclivities aside, Dahl’s talents could be attributed to her previous work writing profiles for The Guardian and Vogue.
Her background in magazines may also be the source of Dahl’s weakness: her tendency to be overly snippy at the expense of the narrative structure. Roald Dahl had a different kind of talent—while no individual sentence from his books could be called earth-shattering, he was a revolutionary architect of stories. In Playing With the Grown-ups, Dahl channels her grandfather’s style by writing from the perspective of a child. But each paragraph, while deftly composed, seems to end in a punch line that breaks up the natural flow of her writing. Rather than a cohesive whole, the book becomes something more like a dish of individually-wrapped candies.
Dahl’s book is somewhat autobiographical, and Kitty spends a great deal of time in the company of her bestepapa, or grandfather. Die-hard Roald Dahl fans will find that this prompts all sorts of burning questions. For all intents and purposes, Roald Dahl hated adults—his children’s stories are always told from the point of view of an adolescent protagonist who must outwit a slew of evil grown-ups, with perhaps one archetypal “good” grown-up thrown into the mix. What Dahl did best was depict adults in the way that children understand them—that is, in Manichean terms, before the kids have the wisdom or experience to understand moral ambiguities or to accept that everyone makes mistakes.
In a seemingly backwards way, Roald Dahl told children what they wanted to hear: contrary to what your parents might tell you, the grade-school teacher who assigns homework over the holidays could, in fact, turn out to be a toeless, broth-stewing, frog-eating witch. When most authors were writing comforting, sunny stories, the elder Dahl flew in the face of convention by confirming children’s darkest suspicions.
What sort of grandfather would such a man have made? Kitty’s bestepapa gives her giant sips of his gin and tonics and pokes earnest fun at Marina’s escapades into Buddhism, pretending to meditate while “releasing a giant fart that sounded like a duck quacking." Such details are enthralling and rare insights into the character of Roald Dahl himself.
Remarkably, he managed to stay attuned to the sensitivities of children well into the golden years of his life, which means that Sophie must have had an influence on him as well—he even named the protagonist of The BFG after her. His other works—dark, startling short stories for adults—are no less brilliant and certainly no more forgiving towards adults, even though they are written from adult perspectives. They have been published in The New Yorker and adapted by Hitchcock, and deserve a reading by anyone who wishes they could have traded granddads with Sophie for a day or two.
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ROALD DAHL’S BIG, UNFRIENDLY GROWN-UPS
Drinking from a chocolate river, sailing through the sky in a magical peach, sleeping as sweet dreams creep in through the windows—one drifts into a whimsical but graspable world when reading Roald Dahl’s acclaimed children books. Though there is an ethereal quality to his work, Dahl also often focuses on the unjust world that his characters inhabit.
In his children’s books, Dahl’s characters frequently battle with and often triumph over the evil imposed upon them. In Dahl’s lesser-known novels and short stories for adults, the evil sides of human nature are even more present. He uses his distinctive dark humor to attack societal flaws such as poor parenting, greed, and crime.
In his short story “Man From the South,” for instance, a character cuts off others’ fingers in order to steal their possessions. In “Bitch,” a surprisingly morbid and sexual tale, the characters work to create a fragrance that evokes carnal desire. Once concocted, all the men who take a whiff of it desperately crave sexual intercourse. There is something humane and natural in the behavior Dahl details—but also something plainly animalistic.
Unsurprisingly, Dahl’s adult stories enhance the hostile and pessimistic tendencies of his children’s books. The storylines of both, though, are equally imaginative and delightfully implausible. Most importantly, whether he is writing for children or adults, at the core of all of Dahl’s plots lies something disturbing that readers can nonetheless relate to.
—Elisa de Souza
26 March 2009
vol. 6, issue 7
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