Getting Even

If you want to understand the astonishing darkness at the heart of Roald Dahl's stories for adults, you would do well to look at his World War II service--not his well-documented role as an RAF pilot in the early days of the conflict but rather his less-heralded posting as an assistant air attaché at the British Embassy in Washington. It was here, far away from enemy fire, that the cynical worldview that informs Dahl's adult fiction just might have been born. Serving alongside future advertising mogul David Ogilvy, Horatio Hornblower author C.S. Forester and philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Dahl found himself plunged into the sophisticated network of espionage, propaganda, blackmail and sexual intrigue the British used against their American allies to insure they stayed the course in the great struggle against fascism. The lesson was simple--even the best of friends were entitled to lie and cheat if the stakes were high enough.

The budding writer seems to have taken this lesson to heart, because it is difficult to think of another bestselling author who presents a more comprehensively pessimistic view of humanity than the one on display in these fifty-two tales of humiliation, betrayal and revenge. Of course, readers of Dahl's children's books will have caught plenty of glimpses of this darkness. For example, there is that sublimely subversive moment in The Witches when the narrator suggests that "your lovely school-teacher who is reading these words to you at this very moment" might be a grotesque, child-slaughtering witch in disguise. But in the children's books this cynicism is always tempered by the presence of a wise grandparent, kindly giant or sly fox. No such relief is on offer in Dahl's Collected Stories. Readers who like to take their humor black, without a sprinkle of diluting sweetness, will consume this book with immense satisfaction.

Due to its strict chronological arrangement, the collection opens with ten stories inspired by Dahl's RAF piloting days, written either during or directly after the war. These are by far the book's weakest entries, their pathos and propaganda only partially concealed by the tough-guy prose that often reads like it won honorable mention in a Hemingway imitation contest. Here is a brave young pilot's reaction to being ordered out on a dangerous mission in "Death of an Old Old Man": "The others were all sitting around eating their pudding; mine was still on my plate in front of me, and I couldn't take another mouthful. But it was fine when I tightened my jaw muscles and said 'Thank God for that. I'm tired of sitting around here picking my nose.' It was certainly fine when I said that." Pudding, indeed.

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