The thrilling sequel to Boy
Despite the fact that my entire past 3 years have been filled with doctoral work, I have not stopped reading for fun, either alone or with my wife and kids. In fact, I dare say I’ve read more novels in the past 2 years than I had in the previous 5! I needed an outlet!
What I haven’t been doing though it keeping on top of my book reviews. My monthly averages have staggered since my dissertation work began. You may not know it, but I have a personal goal of reviewing 8-10 books each month, no matter the genre. I just need to get my thoughts out there before I forget what I’d read.
I write all this because, despite my busyness, I’m shocked that I had not yet reviewed what was arguably my kids’ favorite Roald Dahl book to date! Now this opinion might shock you, because Going Solo is Dahl’s autobiographical account of having done business in Africa and having flown for the RAF in Greece and North Africa during WWII. I would never have named such topics as appealing to my kids (ages 10 and 12), yet they ate this book up!
What drew them in, I think, was again Dahl’s tactic of relating his story not with the boring details needed to offer a foundation to help us understand the rest, but rather with anecdotes, chronologically shared moments in his life that made him the man he became, yet otherwise detached accounts that make for fantastic, chapter-style reading. Of this, he writes:
A life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number of great ones. An autobiography must therefore, unless it is to become tedious, be extremely selective, discarding all the inconsequential incidence in one’s life and concentrating upon those that have remained vivid in the memory. (Introduction)
Who can argue with that? And why the heck don’t more autobiographies and memoirs follow a similar methodology? One needn’t be a short-story writer or a children’s author to relate the great incidents of his or her life to others. We need more books like this.
Of particular enjoyment to my kids were the chapters “Simba” (about the tiger lion that carried off a village woman) and “The Battle of Athens — The Twentieth of April” (about his laborious and dangerous air battle against German fighter planes).
My own personal favorite was “Survival,” which recounts his famous crash and subsequent recovery. I say “famous,” because it was the article he wrote about this event in a magazine that sparked his writing career. In this chapter he writes about temporarily losing his eyesight, offering another keen, hindsight-take on the situation that makes him such a joy to read. He writes:
It seemed to me that I had been permanently blinded, and as I lay there in my quiet black room where all sounds, however tiny, had suddenly become twice as loud, I had plenty of time to think about what total blindness would mean in the future. Curiously enough, it did not frighten me. It did not even depress me. In a world where war was all around me and where I had ridden in dangerous little aeroplanes that roared and zoomed and crashed and caught fire, blindness, not to mention life itself, was no longer too important. Survival was not something one struggled for anymore. I was already beginning to realize that the only way to conduct oneself in a situation where bombs rained down and bullets whizzed past, was to accept the dangers and all the consequences as calmly as possible. Fretting and sweating about it all was not going to help. (108)
Roald Dahl’s dual-book autobiography are certainly books that I will read again someday (and that’s saying something!). His method, style, and stories are well worth your time to explore and enjoy. And who knows? Maybe these books will spark in you a desire to share some of your own memories for posterity. You needn’t be as great a writer as Dahl, mind you, just one who cares not to let your vivid memories die with you.
Next up for us, The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
©2023 E.T.
Read More from Roald Dahl:
- Adult Short Stories:
Over to You (1946)
Someone Like You (1953)
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (1977) - Children Fiction:
James and the Giant Peach (1961)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)
The Magic Finger (1964)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970)
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972)
Danny the Champion of the World (1975)
The Enormous Crocodile (1978)
The Twits (1980)
George’s Marvelous Medicine (1981)
The BFG (1982)
Dirty Beasts (1983)
Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984)
The Giraffe, the Pelly, and Me (1985)
Going Solo (1986)
Matilda (1988)
Esio Trot (1990)
The Minpins (1991)
The Vicar of Nibbleswicke (1991)