Since my son was reading Roald Dahl’s The Witches, I decided to read it too. While I have read a lot of his books for children, some of them when I was a kid, and his stories for older audiences, that was a book that I had never read.
That was a weird read.
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First of all, let’s be honest. Roald Dahl’s work has always had elements of the grotesque and the macabre and the really bizarre. Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator reads like it was written during a severe fever where opiates were part of the treatment plan. But his other kids books balance out that with happy endings.
(No, I haven’t seen any of the movie adaptations of the Witches but I did l know they were out there)
An orphaned boy learns from his grandmother that witches are real and among us. They look like humans, other than their hands, feet, and their saliva. Oh, and they’re bald but being bald as a qualifier as being inhuman feels kind of extreme. And their whole deal is killing children.
When the unnamed boy and his grandmother end up at a resort where all the witches of England just happen to be meeting, they manage to wipe the witches out by using the witch’s’ own transformation potion against them. But the boy also gets hit by the potion and will be a mouse for the rest of his life.
While the topic of The Witches is probably the darkest of any Dahl book I’ve read, the tone isn’t. The witches are serial killers with genocidal plans, which puts the people-eating giants in the BFG to shame. However, their behavior is incredibly childish with the Grand High Witch in particular coming across as a petulant brat.
Even by Dahl standards, the contrasts are jarring.
Then there’s the boy’s final fate. Permanently transformed into a mouse with a significantly reduced lifespan. And he plans on dying with his grandmother since they now have about the same life expectancy. The boy views this as a happy ending but I’m not sure how many readers will agree with him.
Really, what the Witches lacks that so many of his works have is whimsy.
And I was unsurprised to learn that the book has been accused of being misogynistic. In fact, the first draft of this blog entry was twice as long discussing that. And that was just too distracting. What I will say is, regardless of authorial intent, the book is very easy to give a misogynistic reading of. Which is definitely not to say don’t read it. Just keep that in consideration, particularly when discussing it with children.
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