The man behind Matilda

When the curtains open on the Benson stage this weekend, the Homecoming musical will bring to life the story of Matilda, a precocious child who uses her special powers to survive in a world of awful adults. If the basic premise sounds familiar, it may be because it’s a staple of children’s literature. Good-hearted kids are the heroes, and mean, nasty grown-ups get their comeuppance.
While some writers exploit this theme to pander to their young readers, not all of them do. In fact, Matilda herself springs from the pen of the most unsentimental and delightfully macabre of children’s authors, a man who showed that people of all ages can be either decent or rotten. A man who talked up to kids and who was one of the architects of my childhood.
The Welsh-born Roald Dahl was an ace fighter pilot during World War II and later one of the most successful authors of all time. A boyhood incident in a candy store — where he was caned by a tyrannical schoolmaster for putting a dead mouse in a jar of gobstoppers — was, to say the least, a formative experience.
I was a senior in high school when Roald Dahl died in 1990, and a long time had passed since I had picked up one of his books. But his eccentric novels were a critical part of my education, giving me an early appreciation for quirky British humor. I read them over and over — dreaming of tunneling underground with the foxes, sailing the ocean in a giant peach, and soaring into outer space in the great glass elevator.
After all, Mr. Dahl is the writer who gave us the unhinged candy-maker Willy Wonka and his rhyming Oompa-Loompas. Yes, the story centers on the good-natured Charlie Bucket. But when it comes to showing how gleefully awful children can be, few can match Roald Dahl.
Augustus Gloop — the glutton named for a Roman emperor. Violet Beauregarde — the insufferable gum addict. Veruca Salt — the kind of spoiled brat who could easily be rubbed into a wound. Mike Teevee — the embodiment of what has been wrong with every media-soaked 8-year-old from 1948 to the present. And get this — Wonka lures them all into his chocolate factory to be tortured in bizarre, sugar-coated ways.
Millions of adults are still trying to explain to their therapists why they loved all this so much as kids.
But even when he relied on more traditional archetypes of the pure child mistreated by horrid relatives, Dahl never played by the rules. Hence the story of “James and the Giant Peach,” where sweet little James is the victim of two terrible aunts — wickedly named Spiker and Sponge — who refuse to let him have any fun. He makes up for lost time, though, when he hitches a ride on a strangely mobile giant peach, along with a caterpillar, a ladybug, a spider and more.
Dahl had fun with talking animals, never more so than in “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a book I remember listening to my teacher read aloud. All Mr. Fox wants to do is to grab a bite of food, but he soon runs afoul of three cantankerous farmers: Boggis, Bunce and Bean. Vowing to kill the thief but too lazy to give chase, these dolts set up camp at his foxhole with rifles aimed at the opening.
So, our hero simply devises an elaborate network of underground tunnels leading straight into the chicken coops of messieurs Bean, Bunce and Boggis — robbing them blind while they sit, year-round, waiting by the foxhole.
As a child I sympathized with the clever underdog outwitting the grownups. Now, sadly, the tables have turned, and moles have created the same tunnel system under my house. If I did not have a full-time job, I would be sitting beside the molehill day and night with a rifle. That is, if I had a rifle.
Only recently have I discovered “The BFG,” written by Dahl in 1982. I don’t know how I missed it at age 10, except to say that in those days I was deep into a Star Wars mania that blocked out everything else. But I watched the 2016 film for the first time just a few weeks ago and was enchanted by the tale of a Big Friendly Giant, who rescues a girl from being eaten by his not-so-friendly giant neighbors.
While good always triumphs at the end of his books, I loved that the Welsh author’s crazy landscape was populated with oddballs of every age, and with wonderful words like “scrumdiddlyumptious,” “snozzcumbers” and “Vermicious Knids.” So, as you cheer on little Matilda in her battles with the wicked Miss Trunchbull, be sure to give a wink to that line in the program that says, “Based on the novel by Roald Dahl.”