“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.