Nowadays, when trust in mainstream institutions has diminished, the anarchic children's author Roald Dahl seems strangely prescient. What is James's Giant Peach, dislodged, inhabitants and all, sent floating out to sea, other than a form of Brexit? What is Willy Wonka, other than a glorious populist ideologue? Who are The Twits?
Well, we'll leave that one up to you. The Irish Times can't take a position. But we honour his legacy today.
But we honour his legacy today. It's100 years this month since the birth of Dahl, the gloriumptious human bean, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits, George's Marvellous Medicine, James and the Giant Peach, the BFG, The Witches, all wild, funny, verbally-dextrous, stories about idiosyncratic children in an unpredictable universe.
He influenced a generation. When Dahl’s children’s books appeared in the 1960s, 1970s and then incredibly frequently in the 1980s, they were a corrective to an ordered hierarchical literary universe in which children were supposed to be well behaved and “good”.
Dahl's heroes – Willy Wonka, George, Matilda, the narrator of The Magic Finger – wield their power with reckless, often hedonistic, abandon. His preferred demagogues are half-mad, trouble-making industrialists like Wonka, or thieving anti-establishment types like The Fantastic Mister Fox or the poaching father from Danny, The Champion of the World.
His antagonists are crushed beneath giant peaches, tortured by ducks or shrunk away into nothing by home-made biochemistry experiments. Some characters are flushbunkled violently. There’s a lot of filthsome whizzbottling (farting).
Biographer Jeremy Treglown called him a "Tory anarchist". Children who read his books at his peak are now grown up and have thoroughly imbibed his subversive messages: don't believe what you're told; distrust authority; seize power.
Those adult children are clearly now out there in the world causing trouble like Vermicious Knids and a new generation are no doubt being weaned on his jumpsquiffling, frothbuggling, phizz-whizzing oeuvre. It’s what Dahl would have wanted.