DAHL, THE BIG, NOT SO FRIENDLY TYRANT

Apollo £20 ★★★★★

When film producer Cubby Broccoli asked Roald Dahl to write the script for You Only Live Twice in 1966, it seemed like a match made in heaven. The suave intelligence officer had not only had a stellar wartime career, he was a friend of Bond author Ian Fleming and also dated such Hollywood goddesses as Ginger Rogers and Marlene Dietrich. Six foot five in his stocking feet, handsome and arrogant, Dahl could have given Sean Connery a run for his money.

Although he always referred to the ‘silly James Bond’ script he wrote, he remained desperately proud of it. It also turned out to be the crucial turning point in a writing career that had endured more false starts than he liked to admit. Dahl was by now 50 and had been trying, and failing, to become a successful author for a quarter of a century.

The New Yorker had turned down his short stories more often than not, and although Walt Disney bought his first book, it pulled production because

Dahl proved so difficult to deal with.

Even later classics such as Matilda had a wobbly start. ‘I got it all wrong,’ Dahl said, in a very rare admission of vulnerability, before reworking it.

In this impeccably balanced new biography, Matthew Dennison is up front about the emotional damage that Dahl inflicted on family as well as colleagues. The British-Norwegian author emerges as a bombastic tyrant who insisted that his writing was wonderful, even when it wasn’t, and made a point of bullying all the ‘little people’ in his life, which was everyone, basically. He also, famously, made antisemitic remarks in print. You can only feel grateful that he didn’t live long enough for Twitter.

Dennison doesn’t claim to break new ground. But what he does do exceptionally well is show how Dahl’s life was built on a Shakespearean scale. The tragedies were appalling – the early death of his father and his seven-year-old daughter, and the grave illnesses not only of Patricia Neal, his Oscar-winning actress wife, but also his brain-damaged baby son.

It would take a certain kind of willpower to get through all this, and willpower is what Dahl had in spades. Quite apart from his children’s books, which were the first to show that being young often means feeling helpless, angry and desperate for revenge, Dahl also devoted himself to making young lives better. When his baby son almost died from inadequate medical equipment, he invested time and money in inventing a new kind of brain shunt that transformed survival rates.

For this alone, Dahl probably should have been made ‘Sir Roald’. He minded terribly about not having a title, blaming it on Establishment snobbery. Yet in September 2021, 30 years after his death, Netflix paid more than £500million for rights to the children’s classics that have made him a household name: Charlie

And The Chocolate Factory (above), Danny, The Champion Of The World,

The BFG and Matilda. And that would have made him very happy indeed.