Through a Magic Ring:
Reading Books by Roald Dahl
Magician is the word that describes him. Try to guess his name: the
great children’s writer, Roald Dahl! Fantastic books from a fantastic man. Read them and
you will find a real treasure!
Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales of Norwegian parents. He was
educated in England before he started to work for the Shell Oil Company in Africa when he
was eighteen. He began writing after a ‘monumental bash on the head’ sustained as an
RAF fighter pilot during the Second World War. Roald Dahl is one of the most successful
and well-known of all contemporary children’s writers. His books, which are read by
children the world over, include Danny the Champion of the World, Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, The BFG, Matilda, The Great Mouse Plot and Other Tales of Childhood, and
The Witches, winner of the 1983 Whitbread Award.
Roald Dahl wrote a lot for older readers but I like the books for and
about children the best. While reading Dahl’s stories and his childhood tales, I
remembered the words of Oscar Wilde, “If you want to make children good make them
happy”. Roald Dahl gives us the formula for “the perfect life for a small boy”.
It’s so little a child needs: father and mother in a beautiful house beside the sea,
always plenty of other children to play with, the sandy beach to run about on and the
ocean to paddle in (James and the Giant Peach). The main characters of Roald’s
books are brilliantly happy in spite of all the difficulties in their life. They’ve got
real devoted friends and, wise and kind people nearby.
In the book The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me there is such a
rhyme:
All you do is to look
At a page in this book,
Because that’s where we always will be.
No book ever ends,
When it’s full of your friends,
The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me.
So Dahl’s books will never end for children because they are full of
their good friends.
Kindness sparkles through all the words of Dahl’s books. It gives to
small children the eternal lessons of love, friendship, and virtue.
Dahl wrote all his children’s books from a specially built writing
hut in the apple orchard of his house in Great Misseaden, where he could write alone,
shutting out the outside world in order to concentrate. Roald Dahl told about himself,
“I love writing, I hate writing... The writer is the loneliest of men... Why do I write?
For one thing because I want freedom. Be my own boss. I think a lot of nonsense is talked
about the ‘creative urge’. I never say I’m a creative artist because this is death.
I’d become too conscious of my audience and would start writing for people instead for
myself... The greatiest fear I have is of boring the reader. Everything I write is guided
by this...”
Oh, an incredible world of Dahl’s books is sometimes grotesque and
sometimes magical! I admire the plots, the action, and especially the language. The author
never repeated himself, e.g. “The Pelly is starving, the Monkey is famished and I am
perishing with hunger...” (The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me), “...my only
ambition, my hope, my longing was to have a bike...” (The Great Mouse Plot and Other
Tales of Childhood). What a colourfull epithets and metaphors he used: “a sort of
giant ladybug”, “a colossal grasshopper”, “a mammoth spider”,
“all around them lay the vast black ocean, deep and hungry” (James
and the Giant Peach), “a bright surprising sun” (Neck), “...the
water was boiling with them...” /sharks/ (James and the Giant Peach). “Every
writer must always struggle. Ruthless cutting and changing; the agony of seeking always
the shortest possible word, the one right word... To the true writer every word, every
comma matters. He must give his best to the smallest detail. This is the difference
between good and bad writing...” wrote Stephan Merric in his essay about Roald Dahl
which was published in the magazine “Argosy”.
Roald Dahl added “I’m a slow writer. Now you can see how slow. It
takes me four or five months to write one story... I rewrite so much that fifty pages of
typescript can mean five hundred of my written pages.” We are instructed by the superb
fascinating plots of Dahl’s stories and again his words about this. “Plots are
terribly hard to find. The important thing is to write a plot down the moment you think of
it, or it’s gone. Plots are really like dreams, out of your unconscious.” While
reading the books by Roald Dahl I constantly write out bright expressions, and unexpected
words.
Roald Dahl shows to us the rich fairy inner world of a child. Dahl
adored children. He loved them tenderly. He told his own children tales. His descriptions
are short, laconic, ironic, bright. The endings of his stories are always surprising.
Roald Dahl was the absolute master of “twist-in-the tale” or “sting-in-the-tale”.
Dahl is unpredictable in his writing, his stories are both psychological and detective
mysteries at the same time.
I’m not a literary critic. But even a real critic can’t value a
real work of art. Roald Dahl’s books are real works of art. My purpose is quite
different. I only want to tell you about these fellings of happiness and rapture that
books by Roald Dahl gave me. After reading them you simply can’t remain the same. You
will, without any doubt, change. You will become kinder and cleverer. His books teach us
to live in love and peace, but not in war and hatred.
This was the Motto that Roald Dahl lived by:
My candle burns at both ends,
It will not last the night.
But ah my foes and oh my friends,
It gives a lovely light.
Dahl’s candle is still burning and it will burn for ages.
Find out more about about Roald Dahl by visiting the web site
www.roalddahl.com.
By Olga Prosyuk,
School No. 2, Chekhov, Moscow Region
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