Volume 41, Number 11 · June 9, 1994
At the Heart of the Onion
By Claire Tomalin
Roald Dahl: A Biography
by Jeremy Treglown
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 322 pp., $25.00
Most of the stories Roald Dahl wrote for adults are built on tricks and surprise twists, usually nasty ones. A scientific genius who has bullied his wife finds a way of keeping his own brain and one eye alive after the rest of him has died: at the end of the story the wife is preparing to take brain and eye home and have her revenge. The secret wife swapper who arranges a bed trick with his neighbor one Saturday night finds his own wife purring and ecstatic on Sunday morning as she has never been after his love-making. A Don Juan of the twentieth century thinks he has seduced the beautiful wife of an Arab millionaire who has invited him to stay, only to find he has been tricked into spending the night with his leprosy-struck daughter. In real life too, Dahl liked to play tricks, serving disgusting cheap wine from bottles bearing old, expensive labels in order to study the reactions of his polite dinner guests—really to make fools of them, of course.
Review, 2077 words
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