Roald Dahl was an integral part of my childhood. As a child, I read, or had read to me, almost every one of his books. I must’ve re-read The Magic Finger and The Twits twenty plus times. So it is with a sense of wonder tinged with nostalgia that I have begun reading Dahl’s book to my five year old daughter. There are probably scores of parents who have had similar experiences, and I imagine they all feel that same strange, mixed up emotion.
When we read to our children we see the stories in a different way. We read out loud for one, which is an unfortunate rarity these days. We do voices - at least I do - imbuing the characters with whatever particular regional dialect we have decided they should have. And we experience the stories less and the experience more. What I mean by that is, I didn’t love George’s Marvellous Medicine. It is far from my favourite Roald Dahl book. But I did love the experience of reading it to my daughter.
Roald Dahl has always had an innate ability to tread the line between childhood and adulthood. His stories do not pander to their audience. They rarely, if ever, wrap up the plot in a nice narrative box with a moral or message clearly printed over the top. The protagonists are usually not even that good. They are flawed, they are questioning reality and finding it wanting in places. They are, simply, children.
George despises his grandmother. He doesn’t want to kill her, he just wants to shake her up a bit. So he ransacks the whole house creating a ‘medicine’ that has disastrous effects. My daughter found these hilarious and, at times, perplexing. As an adult, the plot can feel repetitive, even dull. But George’s Marvellous Medicine wasn’t written for me to read. It was written for me to read to my daughter. And, in that sense, it achieves its goal.
Also, interestingly, the first page contains a brief warning not to try to recreate the Marvellous Medicine at home. I can’t help but feel this was put in at the publisher’s insistence. Dahl would probably not have thought so little of his little audience.
****
Four Stars