“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Joseph Schindelman

 

176 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-9026110290

I don’t remember what I experienced first: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory the book or “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” the movie adaptation of the same; what I do recall is that both latched onto my psyche in some way and hasn’t let go. Which is good. I guess. I hope…

Okay, then. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory concerns 11-year-old Charlie Bucket, his parents and four grandparents, who all live in poverty in a small house outside a town that is home to Willy Wonka’s world-famous chocolate factory. One day, Charlie’s Grandpa Joe tells him about the legendary and eccentric chocolatier and all the fantasy candies he made, until the other chocolatiers sent in spies to steal his secret recipes, forcing Wonka to close the factory. He reopened three years later but the gates remained locked, and nobody is sure who is providing the factory with its workforce (incidentally, Dahl based his story on his own childhood in the 1920s when Cadbury and Rowntree, England’s two largest chocolate makers, often tried to steal trade secrets from one another by sending spies, posing as employees, into the other’s factory). The next day, the newspaper announces that Wonka is reopening the factory to the public and has invited five lucky children to come on a tour after they find five Golden Tickets in five Wonka Bars…

You know the rest, right? Thought so. Just what is it about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, anyway? I mean, if you change the tone just a little bit it could be a horror story in which a maniacal chocoholic entices children to enter his factory where they are systematically murdered and used as the Secret Ingredient in a variety of addictive sweets. What I do know is that, just like Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (reviewed on _) it is a prototypically English work that is both mad and glorious. The setting is magical, the characters are outrageous and their fates certifiable – and I loved every second of it (book and movie, I must add). And to think it could have been even madder, as Dahl in fact cut some characters: Clarence Crump, Bertie Upside, Terence Roper, Marvin Prune, Wilbur Rice and Tommy Troutbeck didn’t make it, while Miranda Mary Piker became the subject of the short story Spotty Powder. And some locations didn’t make it either, like The Vanilla Fudge Room, The Warming Candy Room and The Children’s-Delight Room.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is just one of the reminders I sometimes need that I had a magical childhood filled with sunshine and daffodils in which nothing ever went wrong.

“James and the Giant Peach”, by Roald Dahl, illustrated by Nancy Erholm Burkert

 

160 pages, Alfred A Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0-394-91282-0

Sooooo…I should be honest and say I have not, in fact, read James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl; it was, rather, read to me in the 4^th Grade by Mrs. Roberts. But I figure that counts. Anyway…Dahl’s modern-day children’s classic is as eccentrically English as one could hope for, as you’ll see (*ahem*):

James Henry Trotter is a boy who lives happily with his parents in a house by the sea – until, that is, a carnivorous rhinoceros escapes from the zoo and eats his parents when he is 4-years-old (I know, right? Imagine hearing that shit when you’re only ten). James goes off to live with his aunts, the tall, thin and cruel Spiker and the short, fat and greedy Sponge, who, instead of caring for him, treat him with utter contempt, feed him improperly and force him to sleep on bare floorboards (could Dahl have made a more awful experience for his protagonist?). When he is seven, James meets a mysterious man who gives him a bag of magical crystals, instructing James to use them in a potion that would change his life for the better (I guess Dahl doesn’t know enough not to talk to strangers). However, on the way home he trips and spills the crystals, whence they dig themselves underground. This causes the nearby peach tree to produce a single peach which soon grows to the size of a house, and from there…

Well, you really should read the book yourself. As for me, when Mrs. Roberts read this to my class I think we all thought that it was bonkers…but in a good way. Giant peach? Talking insects? Peregrination via Prunus persica? It’s all good, man. The outrageousness of it all just seemed – I dunno, normal. I’m sure there were subtle insights and hidden meanings to a lot of what Dahl wrote, but I’ll be damned if I could discern them when I was 10 – or 50. What I recall was a jolly good time in which we followed the travels and travails of a boy the same age as us as he escaped a dire homelife to seek adventure with a supporting cast the likes of which we had never even dreamed of. And it worked; don’t know why it worked, but it did. And perhaps, just perhaps, this mad work of English whimsey awoke something within that allowed me to open up and see the world differently, a world in which a giant peach and insect friends was not mad but rather all too rational and, even, desirable.

Or maybe giant peaches populated by large, sentient insects was just cool.

“Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World”, by The National Geographic Society

 

424 pages, The National Geographic Society, ISBN-13: 978-0870444623

My Dad got Peoples and Places of the Past: The National Geographic Illustrated Cultural Atlas of the Ancient World from somewhere when I was a kid and I liked it so much that, when I moved out of my parent’s house, I took it with me. Without asking. “Stole”, if you want to get all legal about it. And am I ever glad that I did. As a kid, I would take this book and just open it to a random page and marvel at what I was looking at. Being new to history as I was, I was astounded that the world didn’t begin the day I way born; indeed, seeing as how human history stretched back far longer than I could have imagined, some nights I just became numb with how ancient we were and wonder what happened to all of those vanished civilizations and how one could spend their life studying one or the other and still only scratch the surface of what they were seeking.

And now that I am seeing this book once again with adult eyes, I have to say that, while the nostalgia factor is strong, the book itself is rather weak, overall. This comes as no surprise as, with the number of oversized books like this one that are conglomerations of pictures and facts and charts and so on, they all tend to be just introductory works meant as broad overviews of their topics that are designed to whet the appetite of the prospective scholar. So in that regard, it is a brilliant success for, while not going in-depth into any one culture, it at least gives one general sense of the same. Mission accomplished, for while I’m still rather ignorant of many of the peoples who inhabit this work, this book was one of many that opened my eyes to the past and compelled me to banish my ignorance and learn more – something I am still doing today.