The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives.  She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad.  She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling.  She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.

And while sitting in an apartment in California, I traveled to an English village with Roald Dahl.  The quote above is from Matilda, Dahl’s wonderful story of a very brilliant little girl.  Matilda loves books, teaching herself to read at the age of three, despite her horrid, neglectful parents who care only about television.  Matilda first shows her spirit through pranks on her parents (retaliation for their treatment of her) but really comes into her own when she goes to school.  Matilda discovers the extent of her own powers as she faces down the terrifying headmistress Miss Trunchbull, to defend her beloved teacher, Miss Honey.

Matilda must be one of those books everyone’s read, right?  If not, get thee to a library!  🙂  It’s a delightful book with Dahl’s full ability to spin out a fun and wild tale.  Everything is taken to an extreme: Matilda reads Dickens at the age of four, and Miss Trunchbull swings little girls around by their pig tails.  But that’s the comic fun of it.  Matilda’s incredible abilities make her entertaining, while her sweetness and unawareness of her brilliance make her a lovable character.  And if Miss Trunchbull was an inch more realistic, this would be a terrible book.

The handling of Miss Trunchbull, and to a lesser extent Matilda’s parents, was particularly interesting to me last time I re-read Matilda.  Maybe it’s because I just read another book about a neglectful and abusive parent–but that one was a serious treatment of the subject, and very much a drama.  Matilda is, of course, a children’s comedy.

Matilda’s parents are portrayed as being dreadful and nasty, but they don’t cause any real harm.  They don’t starve Matilda–they just make her eat TV dinners all the time.  Matilda’s mother leaves her home alone while she’s out playing bingo, when Matilda is only four.  Instead of getting hurt or kidnapped, Matilda cheerfully trundles off to the library.

At school, Miss Trunchbull never hits any children–she just picks them up by their ears, or forces them to eat monster-size chocolate cakes.  She does shut children into a cabinet, but we never see that, we only hear about it.  There’s a discussion at one point on how Miss Trunchbull can get away with everything.  Matilda explains it, “Your story would sound too ridiculous to be believed.  And that is the Trunchbull’s great secret…Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it.  Be outrageous.  Go the whole hog.  Make sure everything you do is so crazy it’s completely unbelievable.”

I think that’s Dahl’s great secret too.  You can write about dreadful things–this is, really, a story about child abuse–but be outrageous and it becomes funny instead of disturbing.  It couldn’t really happen, it has no grounding in reality, and so it’s not upsetting.  The only time Miss Trunchbull’s actions approach reality is in her treatment of Miss Honey–and that’s what finally comes back to get her.

Whatever Dahl’s secret is, it works, and he’s given us a fun and funny story with entertaining and memorable characters.