Roald Dahl was an awful, awful person. He was wildly antisemitic, racist, and so disagreeable one of his wives called him “Roald the Rotten.” He’s a classic case of “separate the artist from the art,” because his whimsical, captivating (but always with a dark side) books seem to bely his misanthropic personality. I thought about this the whole time I was reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Charlie is a sweet, good little boy who lives in abject poverty with his parents and four grandparents. Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory fills the town with the smell of rich chocolate; he is the foremost candymaker in the world. One day he closes his factory due to competitors stealing his secrets. Eventually he re-opens the factory, but he doesn’t rehire any workers. He continues to produce candy, but no one knows who is helping him: no one goes in, and no one comes out, as one of the grandparents says.
This changes when Wonka invites five children to tour the factory with their families. The book relates the wondrous inside of the factory, the less-than-stellar behavior of the children (except Charlie, who is as good as gold), and who the workers are. Speaking of the latter, in the original book from the early ‘60’s, the oompa loompas were actually African slaves, lured to the factory with promises of cacao beans. They were portrayed as giggling children, happy to be toiling away for no money in a place they couldn’t leave. Talk about needing to decolonize the text. In the 70’s, the oompa loompas were recast, as Dahl’s biographer puts it, “in which the Oompa-Loompas had become dwarfish hippies with long ‘golden-brown hair’ and ‘rosy-white’ skin.” Dahl himself later came to understand that his portrait of the oompa loompas was racist, though make no mistake he still remained a bigot.
I remember loving this book as a child, and I love it still. In the edition I have, the illustrations by Quentin Blake are delightful. They perfectly capture every character, especially the mischievous, cheerful Willy Wonka himself. The different kinds of candy are so clever; I wish there really was such a thing as softly mint-flavored grass and gum that’s a three course meal. And the poems/songs the oompa loompas sing are absolutely brilliant, if sharply edged.
My next book will be Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. I can’t remember much about that book except the (shudder) vermicious knids, so it will be fun to revisit it.