ABOUT a year ago a member of our Book Club,  AW, suggested, with his signature warped sense of humour, that we read a collection of adult short stories by Road Dahl,   a writer known pre-eminently for his children’s writing. 

We should have been wary. Months earlier he had subjected us to the Oresteia, by that well-known page-turner, Aeschylus.  I remember from the distant memories of schoolboy Greek that Aeschylus was no Dan Brown or JK Rowling.  On our return to Book Club a month later the more scatological members didn’t hold back the ordure as they described how thrilled they had been to wade through this turgid Greek tragedy.  Mind you, it had stood the test of time.  In the 2020s the tragedy was still there. We had to read it again.  It was as dull today as it was 2,000 years ago. AW thought this was hilarious.  If we had still been at school, he would have been duffed up!

Anyway, back to Roald, according to some wags christened with this consonant short forename because his father couldn’t spell Ronald. Why was the mischievous AW prescribing him for our delectation?  The story collection was titled “Switch Bitch” after the name of the lead story.  They are intriguingly and of course, being penned by Dahl, fabulously written tales.  I won’t spoil it for you in case you want to read it for yourself. Suffice to say the Switch Bitch eponymous story involves a hapless individual who takes advantage of the generosity of a stranger with unforeseen consequences. There’s a show stopping twist at the end of the story.  Where was the humour?  The hapless central character of the piece was called Aziz.  Oh! How we laughed; me mirthlessly, my fellow Book Club members with gusto.

Those who know Dahl, either through his writings, or via the highly popular TV series of the late 1970s/80s, will know that not only did he employ fiendish plot twists but he was no paragon of sensitivity.  His observations were acerbic and merciless.  By today’s standards he used every trope in the book and gloried in reinforcing stereotypes - not quite, an Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman -  but the next best thing.  Like Rudyard Kipling he had a white, Eurocentric view of the world.

Now we Aziz’s are used to featuring in literature, usually unfavourable.  Poor old Dr Aziz faced terrible accusations in E.M.  Forster’s, A Passage to India.  If there’s one thing the Brits hate more than an uppity Indian, it’s an overqualified and accomplished Muslim. Pakistan hadn’t yet been created to take over legacy of prejudice when the novel was written in 1924.

So, you might think I am all in favour of the current revisionism being applied to the books of Dahl and others, if only for revenge on the likes of Forster and Kipling.  I am not.  To spare children the right to read about “fat” people is bonkers, as is referring to people as “ugly”.  Carry on that way and you end up with no useful adjectives for story tellers to paint their word pictures.  Face it, there are fat people; the softer “corpulent” is probably not in most four-year olds’ lexicon.  People are ugly.  Ban that word and by extension you should ban the word “beautiful” for fear of upsetting the ones who feel they are less so.  I am both fat and, since my facial paralysis, ugly too, contenting myself with fading memories of times past.

Writers must be free to express themselves.  Context is all and our history defines us.  In the days of Forster and Kipling, the world was different.  Dahl is more recent but a product of both his environment, upbringing and twisted (should I be writing “non-straight” or “unconventional”?), mind.  Sensitive readers should just get over it. Or not read books written before 2020.