Re-reading Roald Dahl | The Witches.

I mentioned in my last post that I am doing a sort of series where I re-read a Roald Dahl book from my youth and discuss how I feel about it now as an adult. I read the BFG a couple of months ago (The next one of these will probably be the BFG now that I've seen the new film) and I very much still loved the story so I wondered if any other stories could stand the test of time too.

I chose to audiobook this book due to the fact that it's how I consumed it as a child. Every night we would listen to recorded stories at bedtime. I remember popping my cassette tape of The Witches into the player and listening as I fell asleep. I think I managed to find the same recording as even though it is in tracks, halfway through the story it randomly said 'Side two' like it would on the tape and the voice was very familiar.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and I still find the idea of the witches creepy, even though I'm now an adult and they can't smell me! I think it's actually a lot scarier than I remember it being, but perhaps I was just a braver child haha.

So I did a little research to find out a bit more about this book and it turns out that it was banned from a lot of schools and libraries due to misogyny. Dahl responded to this claim saying that that was not his intent at all and he knew many nice women, but witches could only be women and not men. This is an interesting article about what women today can learn from The Witches and the portrayal of women in it.

I didn't manage to find any other opinions on this next observation, but to me characteristics displayed by some of the witches are those that are usually associated with a Nazi stereotype. The accent given to the grand high witch is described similarly to a German accent. The way that she commands her captivated, adoring yet fearful audience is reminiscent of Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler. You have to take into consideration the time of publication, 1983, less than forty years after WWII. Animosity towards Germany was still high in Britain and so this stereotypical germanic villain would not have been considered so problematic.

Also the Jenkins family, chubby Bruno, his uptight mother and entitled businessman father, sounded so familiar to me. And then it clicked, they are basically the Dursleys. I find it interesting because JK is more than likely a fan of Dahl since, well, who isn't? But I'm going to say she probably didn't notice that the Jenkins were stuck in the back of her mind from reading The Witches when creating her own characters.

I remember watching the film a lot when I was younger too and so of course I had to re-watch it. There are some significant changes in the film, one of these being an alternate ending that's not on every edition, but *spoiler alert!* in this other ending the main protagonist is transformed back into a little boy by a good witch. This happens due to an added character, the grand high witch's assistant, played by Jane Horrocks.

Dahl himself is known to have hated the film and he described it as 'utterly appalling', apparently. I can't say that I completely agree with him on that, although the 'special effects' are a little feeble compared to today's technological advances, but hey that's 90's films for you!

Bicks x