Aren’t dreams about dealing with the tough stuff? As a child, Clare relates how Roald Dahl books enabled her imagination to take on death and other tough topics. Dahl’s characters are on the edge of the most perilous moments, as their pain transforms into an acute awareness for the reader how children seek out loving adults.
Clare works wonderfully in meetings. Like the morning she walked into work and told us about her dream about meeting up and talking with Roald Dahl. Listening to her dreamscape is very poignant.
Dahl speaks in her dream about losing Olivia, his most loved child. By anyone’s standards, the author faced a series of personal tragedies which were horrific. Not only the loss of a child but his wife, Patricia Neal, suffers from a stroke which incapacitates her for many years. He also watched his son overcoming a near-fatal road accident.
These moments of tremendous personal agony are the background in which Dahl worked his magical storytelling. They are the episodes of anguish which somehow reaches across time and enters Clare’s dream.
Roald Dahl’s Books & The child’s Experience
Pick A Character
The dilemmas of childhood
In Roald Dahl’s books, the world through the eyes of a child is both frightening and exciting. The driving curiosity of wanting to discover more and more is unrelenting. The exceptional children like Matilda seem normal in the pantheon of curious children with whom Dahl populates his stories. The children are forceful and opinionated.
This is what Clare has emulated most of all – the forthrightness of the children’s views on just about everything.
The Book With No Story is made up of 52 rogue characters who have jumped out of stories she wanted them to inhabit. Many of the characters are children who have that Dahl-like look about them, like Powderscar Power.
Such is her belief in the resilience and strength of the child. Read this for yourself in the preview below.