“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.