Matilda by Roald Dahl
My rating: 3 of 5 stars A Five-Year-Old Bookworm as Fairy Godmother and Prince Charming “The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. . . She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.” Roald Dahl’s Matilda (1988) is an over-the-top paean to reading and to the underdog; it’s a Cinderella story set in contemporary England, with a five-year-old girl as fairy godmother slash prince charming; it’s also an exaggerated takedown of the brutish giant adults in too many little kids’ lives. At first I thought Matilda seems too good and her parents too bad to be true. Mr. and Mrs. Wormwood are so cartoonishly awful, coarse, vain, ignorant, amoral, unfair, and unloving that Matilda seems like a divine alien placed in their home. (That must be the point, but still--) One of the least compelling points of the Harry Potter books (for me) is how unbelievably and uninterestingly unpleasant the Dursleys are, and reading this book makes me think that J. K. Rowling got her inspiration for Harry’s foster-parents from Dahl. I also didn’t at first care for Matilda’s prank revenges on her admittedly deserving father, involving superglue and hair dye, thinking, Matilda, you’re better than that. However, once Matilda starts going to school at age five, I warmed to the novel and ended up enjoying it a lot. Having read through the entire children’s section of the local library and through much of the adult, including most of Dickens, Austen, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hardy, and Hemingway, Matilda starts school, attending the (too) aptly named Crunchem Hall Primary School, presided over by the “formidable” (i.e., malevolent, masculine, muscular, and sadistic) Headmistress (too) aptly named Miss Trunchbull. Miss Trunchbull, aka THE Trunchbull, is “a gigantic holy terror, a fierce tyrannical monster who frightened the life out of the pupils and teachers alike.” The younger children are, the more she loathes them: “My idea of a perfect school . . . is one that has no children at all.” She’s given to sensational feats of cruelty like picking up students by their hair or ears and swinging them around and letting them go to crash to the floor or fly through the air. No one complains because she so intimidates everyone, including the children’s parents, who, anyway, like Matilda’s, would never believe their own kids’ version of events against the Trunchbull’s. The heart of the story concerns the relationship between the extraordinarily precocious, charmingly unaffected, potential-packed, pint-sized polymath Matilda and her sweet, understanding, and impoverished homeroom teacher the (too) aptly named Miss Honey. Miss Honey is one of the few adults who can appreciate Matilda’s brilliance and charm. Her parents sure can’t, trying to force her to watch TV instead of wasting her time on books and insulting her for being stupid etc. As the story develops there are humorous outrageous scenes, involving newts, chocolate cake, mathematics tests, telekenisis (I loved watching Matilda exerting her will to make miracles happen), and the like, as well as some moving ones involving Matilda trying to help her beloved teacher. The ending is splendidly satisfying. The many monochrome illustrations by Quentin Blake are perfect, emphasizing the contrast between the tiny kids and the gargantuan adults looming over them, and in their graceful and grotesque, evocative, free, and easy lines they recall the work of Jules Feiffer for The Phantom Tollbooth. I can see why kids would love Roald Dahl’s stories: they imaginatively depict tiny underdogs who are smarter, braver, and better than the cruel adults trying to lord it over them and who employ prank and plot against the clueless giants to assert their own dignity and agency. View all my reviews
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