Boy by Roald Dahl
Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1984
Category: Biography

Boy begins with a note from the author that this is not so much an autobiography as it is a collection of reminiscences from his childhood. Because of this, the book is entertaining and light where it might have dragged along.  My first real awareness of this book was in the movie You’ve Got Mail, in the scene where Meg Ryan as “the Story Lady” reads to a bunch of captivated children.  It takes a little doing to see what book she reads from, but this is the one.  Since that time the desire to read it for myself has niggled at the back of my mind, and now…here we are.

If Hugh Grant and Hugh Laurie had a baby, that baby would look like the young Roald Dahl. He was the only boy in a family of sisters (he had an older half-brother and half-sister, whom he refers to as “ancient,” but his relationship to them, while close, is different that what he had with his full sisters) and quite dark-haired to their Norwegian blondness.  Boy contains a scattering of photos and excerpts of letters he wrote home all the years he was away at school, in his own handwriting, many of which are simply placed between paragraphs with no explanation.  This adds to the texture of the book rather than making it disjointed, particularly the passages that contrast starkly the experiences he had at school with how he described them in writing home.

I know a few people who dislike Dahl’s stories because the over-the-top brutality some characters display toward children is unsettling, unpleasant, an interruption of the suspension of disbelief necessary to enjoy any fiction.  I don’t feel that way myself, but I was startled to learn just how close to the truth some of his stories are.  While the actions of Dahl’s cruelest characters are of course exaggerations, the emotions, the raw brutality those characters embody, is not far from the truth of what he and other boys experienced at school.  The headmaster who drew out each stroke of the cane to make the punishment more terrifying; the prefect who prided himself on laying each stroke of the cane in the same place (and this, another student!); the teacher who casually instructed a beaten child to clean up the blood and get back to his class–the miracle is that *anyone* came out of that system spiritually unbroken.

Balancing this are moments where you see why the young Dahl became the writer that he did.  School wasn’t uniformly awful.  He particularly talks about how the Cadbury company would on occasion use the boys as test subjects, something Dahl admires as extremely clever–they harnessed the most discerning consumers of chocolate in England and got their opinions for free!  Dahl’s loving memory of those large boxes full of chocolate bars was the direct inspiration for his most famous book, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The ending feels rushed, possibly because Dahl’s teenage years weren’t as interesting; the entire book has the feel of your favorite grandpa sitting you down at his side and telling you thrilling stories of his youth.  It ends with Dahl traveling, as he always longed to do, to Africa, and then enlisting in the RAF when WWII breaks out–and the promise of someday writing another book about those years.  That book is the sequel, Flying Solo, and since I have that one as well, I’ll have to try not to wait so long to read it this time.