James And The Giant Peach
(Roald Dahl)
James and the Giant Peach is pure Roald Dahl in the book's description of the life of James, who seems to have stepped right out of the pages of Dickens long before Harry Potter fell into the hands of unsympathetic relatives. Readers wanting gentle, non-competitive, non-violent world views and stories must be warned off James -- readers wanting real justice for those too weak to get it on their own will want more un-diluted Dahl.
Because he, like Oliver and Harry Potter and Charlie Bucket, lacks parents, James lives with Aunts of the mean variety. They resent him, treat him with exquisite disdain, and keep him from having any of the treats and pleasures a young boy needs. Still, James is a good boy, and while he doesn't put his own hand to doing the Bad Aunts any harm, he nevertheless needn't overexert himself if oversized fruit comes overwhelmingly their way.
Readers who only know Dahl through the syrupy Willy Wonka met in the original Chocolate Factory movie, may be surprised at the Sendak-esque darkness in this book. But readers already acquainted with James's plight won't be surprised at the ambiguousness of Johnny Depp's Wonka in the Tim Burton remake. The children in Dahl's books are much more keenly aware than the adults in their world that life is hard, dicey, and that people are not always what others believe them to be.
Roald Dahl understood what children loathe in adults and in one another: cruelty, stinginess, greed, vanity, dull books and whining. He also understands children's appetite for justice of a poetic variety -- and that we all love it when the bad ones fall, even (especially) when this fall is as nasty as the bad ones. Dahl's stories retain the dark justice of the original Marchen of the Brothers Grimm. They are not nice books, not sweet books, and so they are wonderful, literary books where people who make life miserable for ordinary Jameses and Charlies reap the fruit (literally, in this case) of their appalling labors.
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