Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator - Roald Dahl (1972)
Illustrated by Joseph Shindelman
I have loved Roald Dahl since I was 10. I started with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, of course, and moved on to all his books for kids - James and the Giant Peach and The Witches. The sort of Carrie for kids, Mathilda. The class-conscious, Fantastic Mr. Fox. George's Marvelous Medicine - an absurd and dark tale of revenge, greed and murder. Lucy is 11 and has read all of these, too. My sister found the copy of Great Glass Elevator I read when I was Lucy's age in her attic. When it arrived in the mail, we read it together.
The elevator has crashed through the roof of the chocolate factory. Charlie has been given the chocolate factory and in the movie, the family and Mr. Wonka fly around in the elevator over their picturesque town. It's Munich, for the curious. The book ends with Mr. Wonka landing at Charlie's house and inviting them all to live with him at the factory - a happy ending if you're not one of the other children or possibly an oompa-loompa. Wonka says they are happy but so say all colonizers and enslavers. I was much older when I considered the circumstances of the oompa-loompa's servitude could be exploitive.
The story picks up on the family's way back to the factory. The elevator malfunctions and takes the entire family, including the other grandparents who still haven't got of bed, into orbit where mayhem ensues. The group docks to the just completed, Space Hotel, USA (1972!) where Vermicious Knids, shape-shifting aliens, have taken over. I wasn't that into sci-fi as a kid and it's still not one of my go-to genres - Phil Dick, Urusla LeGuin, William Gibson and Robert Heinlen excepted - so I didn't really remember reading this book. It is classic Dahl. Karma is dealt out to the greedy, the crass and the bullies in great measure, though the punishments are usually temporary. Great lessons for kids on what can and maybe should happen to jerky people.
Now that Lu has read most of the Dahl for kids, she was ready for some adult stories. My Mom bought me his short story collection, Someone Like You, when I was her age and we read them together - at the same time, rather. I don't remember my mom and I doing anything together. For years we talked about his story about the wife who finds out her husband is cheating on her and clubs him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb, then calmly puts it in the oven and calls the police. When the police arrive, the wife tells them she was out at the grocery, came back and there he was, head bashed in on the floor, his scotch up-ended on the carpet and his cigarette still burning in the ashtray. The cops believe her and scour the surrounding neighborhood for the murder weapon or any clues. When they return to the house exhausted with no leads, the wife offers to feed them. She was cooking dinner after all and she couldn't possibly eat an entire leg of lamb by herself and what a waste it would be, so...
It wasn't that often but every time my mom made a leg of lamb, that story would come up.
Some of the stories are too grown-up psychologically for her attention span but there was another one we read about a kid who had invented a game in his head using the multi-colored carpet of his hallway. The red sections were hot coals. The black sections, swirling bands of poisonous snakes. He can only walk on the yellow sections. But is there enough yellow in the carpet design to make it across the hallway and down the steps to the safety of his mother? Before long we are thinking this boy's situation is as real as he thinks it is. And when he falls over into the black puddle of adders and cobras, we are left to wonder if he survived. Incredible story-telling.
Another of my Mom's favorites from that collection is called, "Man From the South." The setting is a resort in Jamaica. Poolside, The Man, hustles a guy sitting next to him into a bet. An unusual bet. The new lighter the mark has been bragging about lights even in the wind, he says. So The Man bets him it won't light ten times in a row even inside. The wager? The Man will put up a brand new Cadillac against the mark's left pinky. I won't tell you how it ends but it is one of Dahl's greats. He wrote it in 1948. Alfred Hitchcock Presents devoted an episode to this story in 1960 starring Steve McQueen as the mark and Peter Lorre as The Man.
