posted on 23 Oct 2024

Someone Like You by Roald Dahl

We all periodically want reading that offers a bit of light relief but I’m always hoping to discover what Orwell used to call ‘good bad books’ – the kind of book, he said in his famous Tribune essay, ‘that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished’. In short, books that entertain but do so with some sense of quality and integrity.

At one time I used to turn to crime novels for light reading, especially old Penguin ‘greenbacks’, which I relished for their Golden Age period charm. But now they just exasperate me. I enjoy the atmosphere and the settings of some crime stories – the wonderful opening of Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Nine Tailors, for instance, when Wimsey crashes his Daimler in a snowstorm in the Lincolnshire Fens – but I’ve no patience with all the boring stuff about clues and witnesses and investigation. 

Anyway, in search of some lighter reading recently I found myself dipping into this Penguin Modern Classics edition of Roald Dahl’s Someone Like You, picked up for a couple of quid in a local charity shop. I had read at least some of these before, but many years ago. To my surprise I found myself devouring one story after another. 

In the late-1970s I thought Dahl’s stories seemed the very definition of a guilty pleasure – not quite ‘real’ literature, and difficult to describe without reaching for clichés such as ‘sting in the tail’ or ‘macabre twist’. And when they became the basis for the hugely popular TV series Tales of the Unexpected – which ran for almost a decade from 1979 and was crammed with the big TV names of that period – they seemed an even guiltier pleasure. 

But in fact these stories are not at all as I remembered them. While some of them are the kind of thing I remember from the TV series – dark, sardonically funny, even slightly cruel – quite a few are actually considerably more sophisticated than that, revealing Dahl as both a fine prose stylist and widely cultured. ‘Neck’, for instance, does have a sort of double-bluff twist-in-the-tale of a kind that Dahl was fond of, but it works as a story because Dahl lightly sketches in a wealth of background detail about art connoisseurship, antiques and eighteenth century architecture. Without this it would be a lesser story and in other hands would undoubtedly be clumsier and with a much shallower hinterland. 

Another story which is made by its wonderful background detail – in fact, it’s one of the finest in the collection, I think – is ‘Galloping Foxley’, an obviously deeply remembered and felt story that almost certainly draws on Dahl’s own experiences at public school. It is about a bullied new boy forced to ‘fag’ – be a servant – for a smug, brutal older boy who flogs him mercilessly. If you didn’t know this was by Dahl I’m not sure you would necessarily identify it as his work. But the setting and background detail – the narrator’s house in the stockbroker belt, his daily commute from his local country station up to the city, the staid, familiar faces, the stiflingly predictable routine which both bores and comforts, and an unsettling meeting on an otherwise unremarkable commuter train – raise it to another level.

The other important thing about these stories – which I don’t remember recognising at all when I first read them – is their rich period atmosphere. Someone Like You was first published in 1953 and all the stories were written in the late-1940s or very early-50s and they perfectly capture and reflect the habits and lifestyles of that time. I suspect that many who appreciate these stories do so, like me, for their dark mischief and unexpected period glamour.

Dahl’s reputation has not survived untarnished, of course, and Penguin’s recent decision to reissue his books for children in new editions scrutinised by ‘sensitivity readers’ gives the impression that readers of his work need to be supervised. In fact, as far as these adult tales are concerned, some readers will probably think that some of them could do with being a bit more sensational. But Dahl’s intention here was not gratuitous shock. These stories, light in tone but with an undercurrent of unease remind me a little of Saki. 

Dahl may be light reading, but the best of his work has a more serious intention and I wouldn’t mind betting that even Orwell, that austere, ‘wintry conscience of a generation’ (as V.S. Pritchett memorably called him) would probably find room for some on his shelf of ‘good, bad books’.

 

Alun Severn

October 2024