Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Wales of Norwegian parents. He was
educated in England before he started 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
fight pilot during the Second World War.
Roald Dahl is one of the most successful and well-known of all
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, The Witches, (winner of the 1983 Whitbread
Award).
Roald Dahl wrote a lot for older readers, too, but I like the books for
children the best. While reading Dahl’s stories and his childhood tales I remember 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”. There’s so little the
child needs: a 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 Dahl’s books are brilliantly happy in
spite of all the difficulties of 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
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 is sparkling through all the words of Dahl’s books; they
give to small children the eternal lessons of love, friendship, virtue.
Dahl wrote all his children’s books from a specially built writing
hut in the apple orchard of his house in Great Misseaden, were he could write alone,
shutting himself off from 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 greatest fear I have is of boring the reader. Everything I write
is guided by this...”
Oh, an incredible world of Dahl’s books 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 colourful epithets and metaphors the writer used: “a sort
of giant ladybug”, “a colossal grasshopper”, “a mamoth 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 struck 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, unexpected words.
Roald Dahl shows to us the rich and fairy inner world of a child. Dahl
adored children. He loved them tenderly. He told his own children tales. His descriptions
are short, laconic, bright, ironic. 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 phsycological and detective 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 about these feelings of happiness and rapture that books by
Roald Dahl gave me. After reading them you simply can’t remain the same. You will,
without a doubht, 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 at
www.roalddahl.com.
By Olga Prosyuk,
School No. 2, Chekhov, Moscow Region