<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/20/roald-dahl-industry-classics-parents>
"Handing down beloved books to your children is one of the best things about
being a parent. And so like countless others raised on Willy Wonka’s golden
ticket and the BFG’s jars of dreams, of course I was thrilled to relive the
Roald Dahl books with my son all over again.
On bored, rainy afternoons we copied
George’s Marvellous Medicine by mixing
potions from the contents of the kitchen cupboards. We made the pilgrimage to
the Dahl museum in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, with its magical
recreation of his writer’s hut and its collection of homesick letters the
author wrote back from boarding school as a boy, which shed a sad kind of light
on the cruel adults who stalk his fiction.
I understand, then, why his publisher Puffin’s decision to update the books
with the help of a sensitivity reader has caused such uproar; why it leaves
many nostalgic adults feeling not just deprived, but morally judged for loving
them in the first place. And I winced along with everyone else at the tin-eared
re-rendering of the Centipede’s song from
James and the Giant Peach, in which
Aunt Spiker – once “thin as a wire/and as dry as a bone, only drier” – is
ploddingly lumped in with her brutish sister as “much of the same/and deserves
half of the blame”.
All that said, am I shocked that the Dahl empire – and it’s quite the empire,
with Netflix buying up the rights from the writer’s estate for a cool £500m in
2021 – would move to protect its investment? Do I find it Orwellian that before
long you’ll find the originals only in charity shops? No, not enormously."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
