Georgette Heyer was not known for paying much attention in her historical fiction to the problems faced by the lower classes, especially in her Regency novels, by now almost entirely focused on comedy. The lower classes, when they appeared at all, showed up as loyal, devoted servants—sometimes too devoted—thieves, or comedy figures. But after three straight Regency novels, in Arabella, she suddenly decided to introduce a touch—a mere touch—of poverty, as if to acknowledge that even in the idealistic Regency world of her creation, genuine, real poverty could appear.  And as if to immediately soften this, she surrounded this poverty with witty dialogue, romantic banter, and what by all appearances is the expected romantic ending. Appearances only; a closer look shows that the ending has, shall we say, issues.

[Which means, of course, that I have to massively spoil the ending. But since most of you will guess the main parts of it anyway, I don’t feel that bad about it.]

The second movie based on a Roald Dahl novel to be released in 1996 was Matilda. Like the novel, Matilda tells the story of a precocious young girl who, after severe emotional abuse from her parents and the school principal, develops powers of telekinesis. It’s one of the rare films that focuses on girl power, and it’s a pity that—thanks largely to its source material and some surprisingly uneven directing from veteran Danny DeVito, it doesn’t quite work. At least for adults. Nine year old girls, I suspect, will be grinning.

[Comparison of the book and film, with major spoilers for both.]

The Most Noble Adolphus Gillespie Vernon Ware, Duke of Sale and lots of other titles, or Gilly to his friends, leads a life most of us might envy: several grand houses, armies of servants that put Downton Abbey’s elaborate staff to shame (Gilly has a Chief Confectioner, although his agent is not Entirely Happy with this person), and a family and staff devoted to his best interests. Indeed, they are pathetically concerned about the 24 year old Gilly’s supposedly fragile health. Gilly, in turn, hating arguments, and aware of how much he owes his various guardians, slinks back from asserting himself, even as his inner anger at the constraints about him grows. It’s a testament to Georgette Heyer’s powers of writing in The Foundling that all of this wealthy oppression manages to seem sympathetic.

[Not very sympathetic, admittedly, but somewhat sympathetic. How ordinary life creates an appreciation for the aristocracy, and the search for purple gowns. Spoilery.]

Presenting “Snowmelt,” a reprint of an original poem by Mari Ness in celebration of National Poetry Month on Tor.com, originally published on Goblin Fruit.

Tor.com is celebrating National Poetry Month by featuring science fiction and fantasy poetry from a variety of SFF authors. You’ll find classic works, hidden gems, and new commissions featured on the site throughout the month. Bookmark the Poetry Month index for easy reading.

[Read “Snowmelt”]

Jim Henson’s last work was done on The Witches, a live-action/puppet adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1983 novel. It was, oddly enough, the first and only time these veteran children’s entertainers had worked together, although their shared cheery love for violence in children’s entertainment should have created a bond, and Henson clearly admired Dahl’s work. Indeed, a case can be made that, until its final moments, The Witches is the most faithful of the various adaptations of Dahl’s work. It contains properly scary witches, Anjelica Huston as over-the-top evil as really only she can get (Dahl was reportedly delighted to learn that she had been cast), various veteran British comedians and actors, and two cute mice.

I was mostly bored.

[How, how, can Rowan Atkinson and puppet mice be dull? How?]

When a wealthy, good looking baron asks you to marry his dissolute and drunken cousin so that you, not he, can inherit the cousin’s crumbling estate, you have a couple of options: you can wish that you were dancing at Almack’s, or you can find yourself accepting the offer, and marrying a man you have never met before in your life, just hours before his death, turning you into The Reluctant Widow.

[Bonus: Two posts in one, as I also cover the UNBELIEVABLY HIDEOUS film based on this book at the bottom of the post!]

Distressed at previous movie treatments of his books, Roald Dahl refused to allow anyone to film James and the Giant Peach during his lifetime. After his death, however, his widow agreed to sell the film rights, leading to a 1996 Walt Disney/Tim Burton production.

The Disney involvement might have led to a completely animated film. Instead, director Henry Selick chose a mixed live action/stop motion animation format, allowing the film to shift in and out of reality and dream, creating an occasionally surreal, occasionally creepy, occasionally reassuring experience.

[Another film that I should like a lot more than I do.]

“Nonsense” is certainly one word to describe Georgette Heyer’s Friday’s Child, an amusing romp of a novel about the early months of a marriage between two excessively silly and immature people in Regency London. Littered with still more silly and self-absorbed characters, and filled with indulgent descriptions of rich foods that had been completely unavailable to Heyer and most of her readers during the time of writing, the novel’s high points include possibly one of the most ridiculous duels ever put on paper (I laughed), a conversation where five aristocrats show their vast ignorance of history, geography, and Shakespeare, a character worried about being followed by a Greek ghost whose name he cannot remember, and some issues with a little dog named Pug. It is thoroughly unbelievable, but it works because it is also thoroughly funny, and because, beneath all the silliness and froth, it offers a surprisingly serious look at gender roles, marriage and growing up.

Oh, and how not to conduct a duel.

[Duels, canaries, and what WILL Kitten do next?]

As I noted during my post on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, my first viewing of the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory left me, how do we put this? Deeply traumatized for life. In the comments, many of you noted similar experiences. So it was with considerable trepidation that I listened to the Powers That Be at Tor.com and agreed to watch the film, along with a few others based on Roald Dahl books, comforting myself with the knowledge that on this viewing, I would be holding a cat.

So much for that theory. The cat was freaked out too.

[Look, this is STILL a disturbing film, no matter how you look at it. Spoilers for the book and this film only. I’ll be discussing the Tim Burton film in a later post. ]

So by now, you’ve probably either seen or heard about the latest addition to Oz films: Oz the Great and Powerful, released in the U.S. last weekend and reviewed by Tor.com here. The sorta but not exactly prequel to the iconic 1939 MGM film The Wizard of Oz, this new Oz film tells the story of one Oscar Diggs, a carnival showman and magician who takes a balloon through a cyclone from Kansas to Oz. Once there, he finds himself meeting three lovely lovely witches and an overly talkative flying monkey, having conversations about whether or not witches need brooms, fixing little china dolls, facing lions who—conveniently enough—just happen to be cowardly, and alternatively trying to convince people that he is and isn’t a wizard and the prophesized savior of Oz. (Of the country, that is. Even most tolerant viewer probably won’t say he saves the movie.)

[Spoilers, major spoilers, for this film AND the 1939 The Wizard of Oz and the 1985 Return to Oz]

In the middle of World War II, Georgette Heyer found herself obsessed with writing a novel about a family of quarrelsome Cornish aristocrats, led by an often crude, often vicious elderly tyrant, and how people can slowly, but surely, slip into financial ruin—and murder. The novel so obsessed her, she confessed herself sometimes unable to think of anything else. The more she wrote, the more she was convinced that she was at last writing something truly great, the novel that would at last gain her the literary recognition she craved, that even her most serious, painstakingly researched novels or her most popular ones had failed to gain. Penhallow, she was convinced, would be her literary masterpiece.

We’ve all been wrong sometimes.

[Arguably Heyer’s most unpleasant book.]

As a kind of final round up of Roald Dahl’s fiction before we get to the movies based on Dahl’s fiction, two short reviews of Dahl’s last works: The Minpins and The Vicar of Nibbleswicke. Reviews short because, well, the books are short (for some reason I remembered The Minpins as being much longer), but here because they serve as a nice coda to his work. Both were written while Dahl was in failing health—perhaps why neither turned into a novel—and this sensibility colors both books.

[The books!]

Matilda, published in 1988, is one of Roald Dahl’s longest and most intricate novels for children. The story of a highly precocious little girl who slowly develops powers of telekinesis, it focuses more on issues of destiny, education and employment than his usual subjects of wordplay, terror and disgusting things, though the book still has more than one incident that will delight kids who love disgusting things more than it will adults. Richer and more questioning than most of his other novels, it may not be entirely successful, but it offers kids, and possibly grown-ups, a lot to think about.

[“Not entirely successful” may also describe the rest of this unusually lengthy post. Spoilers for the entire book. I’ll be discussing the movie in a later post.]

Georgette Heyer initially found it difficult to sit down and write Faro’s Daughter, distracted as she was with World War II and with a new idea for a contemporary novel that would eventually become Penhallow. Once she had worked out the details of the plot, however, she wrote the book in about a month, typing it in single space, her biographers note, thanks to the paper shortage. She called it all fluff, and indeed, most of the book is pure farce. Yet portions of the book reveal some of her deep-seated anxieties about the war—and concern about traditional gender roles in a wartime environment.

Telling her agent that she was sick of Dukes and other noblemen, this time, Heyer chose for her hero a rough commoner, who, to a degree almost unspeakable in a Heyer novel, does not make his clothing a chief focus of his life. (I shall pause to let you all get over this. Are we ok now? Good.) His boots, however, are excellent, and he is exceedingly wealthy and rude, so he isn’t completely without hope for romance.

[Not that this is exactly the most conventional of romances; spoilers.]

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like as long as somebody loves you.”

After the tragic death of his parents in a car accident when he is only seven, the narrator, who never does get a name in the book, is sent to live with his Norwegian grandmother, first in Norway and then in England. Echoing Dahl’s own relationship with his Norwegian relatives, they speak both English and Norwegian to each other, hardly noticing what language they are using.

The grandmother is both a wonderfully reassuring and terrifying figure: reassuring, because she loves her grandson deeply and works to soften the horrible loss of his parents, with plenty of hugs and affection and tears. Terrifying, mostly because after he comes to live with her, she spends her time terrifying him with stories about witches, stories she insists are absolutely true, and partly because she spends her time smoking large cigars. She encourages her young grandson to follow her example, on the basis that people who smoke cigars never get colds. I’m pretty sure that’s medically invalid, a point only emphasized when the grandmother later comes down with pneumonia, which, ok, technically speaking isn’t a cold, but is hardly an advertisement for the health benefits of large cigars. (Not to mention the lung cancer risks.)

[Read more]

Sophie, an orphan, is suffering a major attack of insomnia, brought on, author Roald Dahl suggests, by the magic of moonlight, or perhaps by the fact that she’s living in a dormitory and has lost her parents, when she catches sight of a long dark shadow. It is, as she soon discovers to her terror, the shadow of a giant—a giant with the power to capture dreams and nightmares and bring them to children. And a giant who is initially not at all pleased to be spotted by a child, since the entire point of giant life is not to be seen by humans—or as the giants call them, “Human Beans.” Especially because most giants survive by eating humans, a diet that works only if humans know nothing about them.

This particular giant, however, is just a little different. He is the Big Friendly Giant, or The BFG, refusing to eat humans. So instead of following his biological destiny and eating Sophie, he takes her from the orphanage to the land of giants and dreams.

[Bad and offensive puns, mingled with magical dreams and a bit about the queen.]

Roald Dahl’s George’s Marvelous Medicine is dedicated, rather cruelly, to doctors. I say “rather cruelly,” because much of the book is a fierce indictment of modern medicines, which, in Dahl’s viewpoint, either do not work and are thus completely unnecessary, are filled with toxins and other strange things and are thus not the sorts of things you should be taking, or, on the rare occasions when they do work, prove almost impossible to reproduce. It’s not exactly the sort of book you might expect from an author known for working closely with doctors to care for his own family members, but Dahl had also lost a child to illness, and by the late 1970s, he was experiencing his own medical issues. So it is perhaps not surprising that he chose to deal with these through an often fiercely bitter book.

[The most unpleasant way of making medicine like ever. Spoilers for the rather abrupt ending.]

“I don’t write problems,” said Royden, in rather too high a voice. “And enjoyment is the last thing I expect anyone to feel! If I’ve succeeded in making you think, I shall be satisfied.”

“A noble ideal,” commented Stephen. “But you shouldn’t say it as though you thought it unattainable. Not polite.”

Georgette Heyer’s agreement with the publishers of her mystery novels stipulated that she was to deliver a mystery/suspense novel to them once per year, a schedule she kept with admirable consistency until the outbreak of World War II. Stress over family members, in particular sorrow for a brother-in-law killed in the early years of the war, and fear for the safety of her husband, who had joined the Home Guard, made it difficult for her to write, or focus on something she found absolutely pointless under the circumstances. She procrastinated a bit with the escapist fluff The Corinthian, but she could make excuses for only so long, and eventually she returned to writing Envious Casca in slow bits and pieces. It was to be one of the grimmest yet best of her mystery novels.

[Spoilery, although again in following the dictates of Golden Age fiction, I try not to reveal the identity of the murder.]

Even by the standards of writer Roald Dahl, The Twits starts out on an unusually disgusting note, with a rant about beards followed by an overly detailed description of just what a certain Mr. Twit has in his, since he has not cleaned it for years. 

I have to strongly, strongly suggest not eating during the reading of this passage or indeed the rest of the book, which is filled with enough revolting descriptions to delight the most hardened, YAY THAT’S SO GROSS kid, and turn the stomachs of the rest of us. I’m also not entirely sure what led to this sudden rant against facial hair on the part of Roald Dahl, but I can say that it, and his later descriptions, have the distinct sense of someone really trying to get everything that irritated him (spaghetti, hunting, guns) described in the most disgusting way possible, as if to purge everything nasty from his brain. At least until it came time to write the next book.

[The beard description does give us a bit of a warning to the hellish practical jokes and animal abuse ahead of us.]