Roald Dahl shaped a generation

Growing up as an only child necessitates that you pursue serious hobbies that will negate the absence of a constant companion. Being an only child in a nuclear family, the only way I could keep boredom at bay was to take up a hobby that would stick. So, reading it was. While I did not have playmates, I had books. Plenty of books. British novelist Roald Dahl’s (1916-1990) children’s fiction constituted a large chunk of my library, and I spent hours discovering new worlds, making ‘new friends’, and above all, learning a new language. Yes, you read that correctly. Dahl was not just a wordsmith; he was an inventor — a magician who whipped up unimaginable words, thus, lending a personal touch to his literature and making it especially exciting for children. He derived these new words from literary devices like alliteration, portmanteaus, anagrams, onomatopoeia, et al. September 2016 being the storyteller’s centennial birth anniversary month, Oxford University Press published a lexicon of Dahl’s vocabulary, curated by Dr Susan Rennie, professor, University of Glasgow. The Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary records the transcendental nature of Dahl’s language, which explains the writer’s enormous appeal to children and adults alike. Words like bundongle (something that only contains air), or fizzwiggler (a cruel, loathsome person) are highly evocative, and often serve to describe people, their situations and surroundings far better than the words they are derived from.

Having witnessed death at such close proximity, that too since a tender age, Dahl’s literature frequently features children who are orphaned, lonely or troubled. Moreover, his unpleasant experiences at Repton School, Derbyshire (which he attended from 1929) find place in stories like Matilda (1988), featuring cruel administrators like Ms. Trunchbull. Much like some of Dahl’s professors and seniors at Repton, the fictional character would resort to the cruelest of tactics to make her students tow the line. Dahl sketches his characters with such attention to detail, that they all but jump out of the pages. So real are these fictional people, that you are able to feel exactly what the writer intended. Dahl’s stories usually feature solitary child heroes who are at the behest of selfish, heartless adults. But Dahl, always rooting for the children, lets his child heroes triumph in the end. These child characters range from the precocious five-year-old Matilda, to the adventurous orphan Sophie (in The BFG).

This year, the writer’s birthplace Llandaff, will be celebrating his centennial year, through a series of events titled Roald Dahl 100.

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