After reading a slew of Stephen King DEATH TO EVERYONE books, with Serious Literature like The Cellist of Sarajevo and Serious Nonfiction like The Other Wes Moore, I was due for some brain candy. For some, that means Danielle Steele or a Twilight book or Fifty Shades of Horny Middle-Aged Ladies, but like my actual candy, I prefer something of a little higher quality. Like Cadbury. And what could be more of a literary version of Cadbury chocolate than Roald Dahl.
A background: I was totally a Roald Dahl kid growing up. Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The Witches were always my favorites. I devoured them like so many creme eggs. But somehow, I missed Danny the Champion of the World. I'm not sure how that happened; maybe the children's library I went to didn't have it. But I always notice it as THE Roald Dahl book on "best children's books" lists and figured it deserved a belated shot.
Danny's mother died when he was a baby, leaving him and his father with each other. They didn't have much money or many possessions; they lived in an electricity-free gypsy caravan behind the gas station/auto repair shop his father ran. But they were not wanting for things, thanks to his father's adventurous attitude. His father taught him how to build a car engine from scratch, how to fly a kite, how to make a fire balloon. He regaled him with fantastic stories before bedtime. What else could you possibly need?
One day, Danny learns of his father's secret hobby: pheasant poaching. Because this is England and people in England are weird, rich people had a habit of raising certain types of game and when they're ripe, inviting all their weird, rich friends to "hunt" the more or less domesticated animals. You know, kind of like "The Most Dangerous Game," but instead of hunting men, they hunt pheasants. Poaching pheasants from these rich people's property was kind of a family and town tradition; not only was Danny's father into it, but so had been Danny's grandfather and mother, the town doctor, the town policeman and even the town vicar. It was a way to catch delicious pheasant while also sticking it to Victor Hazell, the town's designated Mean Rich Guy.
One night, Danny's father goes off a-poaching, but when he doesn't return, Danny goes looking for him. He finds him in a deep pit, a trap set by one of Hazell's pheasant guards, with a broken ankle. Danny gets him out before the guard finds him and their doctor friend, Doc Spencer, gives him a walking cast. Still, Danny's father is kind of irked. I mean, a guy protecting his property from pheasant thieves? The nerve! So he and Danny decide the perfect revenge would be to somehow poach all of Hazell's pheasants the day before his annual big pheasant hunt, where all the local dukes and barons and important people would come to hunt.
The strangest thing about this story was the idea of pheasant poaching as heroic. Admittedly, I was born 10 years and a country away from where this story takes place and so raising game for hunting purposes isn't something I'm familiar with. And Hazell is kind of a jerk. But it's still a weird thing that poaching pheasants is this wonderful activity that unites the whole town.
Still, I was a big fan of the book and here's why. Dahl dedicates this book to his entire family: his wife and four children. And this book is really a love letter to the family bond, particularly that of a father and son. In most of Dahl's books, the protagonist is a precocious child who outsmarts some evil adult - Matilda and her parents/the Trenchbull; Charlie and Willie Wonka; James and his evil aunts. And while Victor Hazell is an adult villain, nearly every other adult in the book is a friend to young Danny, especially his father. It's a nice, sweet message that's less about revenge and more about love.
And adventure.
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