In case you didn't know, tomorrow is Roald Dahl day. I'm not entirely sure what this entails, but if means delving back into Dahl's works then I'm all for it.
I know I'm not alone in acknowledging the effect that Dahl's books have had on my life. The way in which they painted the world in new colours and opened up a universe of possibility that indelibly impacted on my imagination can still be felt now, a quarter of a century after first reading them.
Seeing the image of the great man retiring to his shed with his flask and his pencils each morning was the defining moment that made me want to write for a living. Or just made me want to write at all.
Though he never won any major literary awards, Dahl's status as possibly the best contemporary children's writer is finally being acknowledged with the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, founded Children's Laureate Michael Rosen. Yet Dahl's influence extends way beyond his magical children fiction (though I tore through them all, Danny The Champion Of The World remains my particular enduring favourite). For beyond the tales of glass elevators and friendly giants Dahl offered an insight into another world that was otherwise off limited to adolescents: that dark, twisted adult world of greed, deceit, hustlers, con men, wolves in sheep's clothing and all-round duplicitous behaviour that he covered so well in his Tales Of The Unexpected.
Dahl's could not have intended these macabre, economically-delivered stories in which wives batter their husbands to death with lamb shanks, men are killed for their tattoos and limbs are lost in bets with exotic strangers, to be devoured by pre-teens hungry for something more than children's fiction.
But they were, and though possibly punching above our intellectual weights, young adolescent readers like myself were suddenly privy to a world of black-humoured literature that would have otherwise been closed off to us, and which would shape our future reading tastes. It's surely testament to Dahl's skill as writer that such stories were so accessible. Perhaps it was the fact that generations of fairy tales passed down had prepared us for a world of pain and misfortune. Perhaps it was the quintessential Englishness of the Tales Of The Unexpected, the understated way in which Dahl presented the twists and turns while taking care never to be too obvious, explicit or bloody. Or perhaps it was just because he often left the reader guessing with deliberately ambiguous endings.
It wasn't just his Tales Of The Unexpected either that provided an in-road to adult diction either. The novella The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar And Six More introduced young readers to a world of Eastern meditation, world travel and gambling, while certain images from the story The Swan from the same collection still haunt me now. I'm still surprised no-one has made either into a film. Even Dahl's memoirs Boy and Going Solo seemed to be written about other worlds, where the mundanity and horror of boarding school and a world war were invested with magical qualities.
From these Dahl stories, for me it was only a short leap to the writings of Alfred Hitchcock, then onto novels such as 1984, A Clockwork Orange or The Wasp Factory – works that have at their centre a discernible darkness, but also a sense of mischievousness, subversiveness and/or anti-authoritarian sentiments. Books that similarly weren't originally intended for children, but yet somehow found their way in the hands of me and many others like me.
So while Dahl is remembered as one of the greats of children's literature, let us not forget that he was simply a great writer. I'll be raising a glass of something vile and garishly coloured to him in celebration.
