It could be argued that Fantastic Mr Fox is less a novel and more an Aesopian fable, and this would be true, but it contains the stuff of novels, the themes and characters, and has the potential to linger just as long. Sometimes his books are so bleak, his villains so dark, you wonder if Dahl was not writing out of a hatred of children rather than an affection for them.ĭespite all this, Fantastic Mr Fox is a bit of an anomaly in Dahl’s oeuvre, in that there is no telekinetic schoolgirl, no giant airborne fruit, no humungous bumpkin dispensing dreams through kids’ windows – just a wily fox and his three-pronged nemesis. His books are not easily classified as ‘Fantasy’, although they are certainly fantastical, and sometimes surreal, hallucinogenic, and dappled with the mood altering stuffs of the adult experience.

Dahl’s worlds are ones often where the dangers of a supernatural undercurrent pierce the mundanity of the world we know, and it is a place that interweaves with the fabric of the world that adults know. Dahl’s work is from a more adult place, a place where death is the colour of the peril, where the villains truly are the stuff of nightmares, where cruelty is often a motive in itself, and protagonists are usually bright-eyed (and sometimes bushy-tailed). His masterpieces, from The BFG, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda, to his lesser (but just as puckishly wonderful) works, such as The Twits and George’s Marvellous Medicine, are stories that revel in the gloopy, sticky nastiness of faery tale villainy and phantasmagorical threat, and they are, quite rightly, an integral part of the formative literary landscape of most people of my generation.ĭahl’s work now, on close inspection, sits rather awkwardly with contemporary children’s books with their conventional family issues, flatulence and sassy protagonists.

His cantankerous refusal to pull back to either save the small reader their nightmares or the larger reader their blushes is what makes his work so irresistible, so necessary. The universal success of the children’s books of Llandaff author Roald Dahl has a lot to do with his Mephistophelean delight in the darkness. In the anniversary month of Roald Dahl’s hundredth birthday, we take a look at Gary Raymond‘s review of Fantastic Mr Fox for our Greatest Welsh Novel series.Ī childhood must be hardly worth having if it is one protected from the dark.

Fantastic mr fox quentin blake