Danny, the Champion of the World is a short 1975 children's novel by Roald Dahl, which I just finished reading and which is my fourth Dahl story, following Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, and The BFG. As with these other stories, the setting is England and once again a poor child is the protagonist...in this one it's nine-year-old Danny who lives with his widowed father behind their filling station in a Gypsy caravan (also called a varno). His father is a great mechanic as well as an amateur naturalist and storyteller...the bond between father and son is very strong. One night Danny awakens to find his father is gone...turns out he was poaching wild pheasants on a wealthy landowner's property a few miles away. It also turns out that poaching the pheasants was a family tradition...not only did dad's ancestors do it, but also Danny's mother. The landowner is painted as being arrogant with his wealth and treats practically everyone in the village with contempt...especially Danny and his father. The plot progresses around the poaching and the two's adventures...and misadventures. And then the rest of the town weighs in on what's going on, and eventually I realized that the author had written a story about unjust class divisions, with the "people" in a continual struggle against the "elite" and the rules that unfairly favor the latter. I enjoyed this novel, in which Dahl presented a reasonable, positive philosophy of living...although I wouldn't recommend poaching to anyone. I'm still trying to create a mental picture of that stroller scene at the end...must have been an awfully big stroller, that's all I have to say. At this point in my personal tour of Roald Dahl's writings, Danny, the Champion of the World is my favorite...but I'm still reading on. I think the story has been adapted to the screen although I don't plan to check it out: you'd probably be better served to read it before watching a TV version...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment