Review

"Don't gobblefunk around with words... Meanings is not important. I cannot be right all the time. Quite often I is left instead of right."

-- Roald Dahl, The BFG

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I can't remember when I first read The BFG. It was years ago. It must have been in fourth grade, a year that upsized my reading. It was a year of firsts: Hatchet; The Giver; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; Number the Stars; The Spanish Kidnapping Disaster; The Accidental Detective series by Sigmund Brouwer, one of my all-time favorites; The BFG; Stepping on the Cracks; Bridge to Tarabithia; and Tuck Everlasting.

The BFG was the first Dahl book I read. He's first on my list of whimsical writers, beating out Carroll and Baum with great words like "whizzpopper" (fart) and "scrumdiddlyumptious" (really tasty). Eyeing cliches with distaste, Dahl splits them and restacks them like Legos, coming up with "trunder and thumpets," "once in a blue baboon," "One right is not making two lefts," and "before you can say rack jobinson." He also has fun with Nicholas Nickleby, by Charles Dickens, whom the BFG calls "Dahl's Chickens." Nickleby is the only book the BFG owns.

The stuff about dreams surprised me. The BFG is a dream-catcher, and he stores the zozimus-based things in jars. He uses a trombone-like instrument to blow the dreams into the minds of little children, rather than preying upon them like the other nine giants. Fanciful enough. But the commentary about idealism is what hit me this time around:

"[Dreams] is always invisible until they is captured."

"Dreams ia lots of fun but nobody is believing in dreams either. You is only believing in a dream whie you is actually dreaming it."

"Don't try to understand dreams."

"A dream is not needing anything. It if it is a good one, it is waiting peaceably forever until it is released and allowed to do its job. If it is a bad one, it is always fighting to get out."

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A word about Dahl. He wrote about children under adult thumbs, Mathilda, Charlie, Sophie, James, and on. As a child he was apparently abused in boarding schools following the deaths of his sister and parents. He missed his mother. His friend was caned in a Catholic school by a man who would later become the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It's clear in his books, which seem to be meditations on that common theme. He writes of orphans, the abandoned and lonesome, also the ones with the most ardent imaginations and optimistic spirits. Suffering's peculiar quantity of joy, or the poetic happiness of the stomped-on, is a big part of his appeal. Children--and adults, who for Dahl are merely people who at one time were children--gravitate to those things they understand, or those people who they feel understand them. He's sure to refrain from indicting all adults; in The BFG, the Queen of England and the Big Friendly Giant are positive grown figures, though he's sure to point out that the Queen is short, and the BFG is half the size of a proper giant. Again, it's about the runts.

Dahl's childhood in Norway and England is the subject of Boy: Tales of Childhood, but I think the innocence and idealism comes across best in his novels, which are all simple and fun and short. Quentin Blake's rough illustrations are also a plus.

One last tidbit about Dahl: He fought in the Royal Air Force during WWII (great stories on Wikipedia), then married Patricia Neal, an American actress who later won an Oscar for her role in Hud, with Paul Newman. She also acted opposite John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Patricia had a nervous breakdown the year before Dahl married her, and their first child Olivia, to whom The BFG is dedicated, died at age seven. Measles. They later divorced, after Patricia had several strokes, yet she is still alive, 82, a big pro-life activist. Not sure what that all means in relation to Dahl himself, but I find it interesting anyway.