Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl [Hardcover]

`Storyteller' is about a man who thought invention was more interesting than reality and in making the truth more interesting. Roald Dahl's biography sums up all of his eccentricities, his proclivities and seemingly every aspect of Dahl's personality, most of all his characteristic of the feeling of an outsider. There are astute observations, such as, "his books are a kind of imaginative survival manual for children about how to deal with the adult world around them...freed from parental controls...where everything is possible."
Donald Sturrock had interviewed Dahl for a BBC film, been to his home and was given access to Dahl's papers after his death and interviews with his children and friends. His writing captures your interest, incorporating Dahl's past with his books and stories, so that even if you have not read them, they draw you into his world. There are many helpful footnotes, including those that explain Anglicism's such as conkers.
Dahl's cynicism, "life isn't beautiful...it's full of foul things and horrid people" is incorporated along with his extreme generosity, his love of his family and his failings from his birth to his death.

There was so much more to Dahl's life than what is generally known; but even that would make him worthy of note. He brought to life WWII's gremlins, `James and the Giant Peach', `Charley and the Chocolate Factory`, married Patricia Neal and guided her recovery after her stroke, was instrumental in developing a drainage tech valve to help save his son's life, which also helped thousands of other patients, he was a screenwriter for `You Only Live Twice' and also `Chitty Chitty Bang Bang'. Sturrock is successful in bringing out all of this and more; both the personal and professional aspects of Dahl's fascinating existence.

This biography is an excellent example of researching into someone's life and explaining it with appeal for the reader, whether they are acquainted with Dahl or not. Probably the highest praise I can give, is that it makes a reader want to pick up everything Dahl ever wrote to continue the story.

Prior to reading this book the only thing I knew about Roald Dahl's personal life was that had married Patricia Neal. His fame as a children's author did not fit with this nor my image of him (from book jackets) of his aloof aristocratic bearing. This book describes the reality of his amazing life. Now I see how it all fit.

The book, in covering Dahl from his roots in England and Norway to his death in 1990, is excellent. Author, Donald Sturrock, assembled a lot of known and new material and put it together in a highly readable fashion. That these 500+ pages hold your attention, and mostly keep you page turning, is a real credit to this first time biographer.

Dahl, whose father died when he was 3, was sent to Repton School at the age of 14. It's described as the proverbial nightmare British boarding school, where hazing from peers equals the sadism of the teachers and administrators. This school completed Dahl's formal education, and probably his emotional development as well.

World War II arrived for Britain while Dahl was working in Africa. He joined the RAF which was formative in that he received pilots training, was in aerial combat and had a debilitating accident. This led to a desk job in the British Embassy in Washington DC. As a war hero with a successful free lanced story, he was catapulted into the highest ranks of politics and entertainment. Not yet 30 years old and he is dining with FDR, playing tennis with the vice-president, boxing with Hemingway and dating Clair Boothe Luce. We don't know how he achieved such extraordinary access, but we do know that he was, like Ian Flemming, a spy. It helped that he was handsome and had affairs with rich and beautiful women; He filed reports on some. From the Washington days he made a good and lifelong friend, Charles Marsh.

Sturrock takes the reader through all of this, his two marriages, family life and tragedies and his frustrations as a writer before his children's books. Both Dahl's loving/generous side and his prickly/dogmatic sides are presented. His two marriages cannot be more different; his first seems almost accidental and might have ended in divorce sooner were the couple not bound by tragedy. His attitude towards Pat's role as a wife, and his treatment of her in general, is appalling. He is not often kind to agents and editors and is capable of casting off the most helpful ones abruptly. He is happy in his second marriage and by this time he is also successful in his career. He has lifelong health problems and his last days, as was a lot of his life (6 spinal operations to name just one health problem), are painful.

If you read this book, you will either love him or hate him, or both; you will not be indifferent. You will, though, come away with total respect for this author who has digested a lifetime of work and life and made it accessible.

I hold Roald Dahl personally responsible for my lifelong love affair with books and when I finally held this book in my hands, I was more than a little apprehensive. Did I really want to possibly knock my idol down from his pedestal?

Ultimately, yes.

This tome is a detailed look into the life of a man whose books still enthrall and delight generations of children, even with the creation of the magnificent Harry Potter. Sturrock's writing is remarkably balanced and he doesn't shy away from showing the darker side of Roald Dahl, which, at times, is hard to swallow. I had no idea of the life that Dahl led before he became a children's author. All that I know (pieced together from Boy and Going Solo) is that he was a fighter pilot during WWII and was stationed for some time in Africa. What I did not know is that he was assigned to Washington DC after he was injured during the war. I did not know that the concept of the Gremlins could be applied to him. I did not know that he had been married to Patricia Neal or that he had been friends with FDR or that he had briedly been Hemmingway's assistant to that he had known Ian Fleming. I could on (honestly- there's more) and it's astonishing how little I really knew about the man I have idolised. In spite of the fact that Roald Dahl comes across as a hard and difficult man, there are moments in Sturrock's writing when you truly feel the heart of who he was. His love affair with his 2nd wife Liccy is very touching and the influence that he had on the hearts and minds of his young fans is a beautiful thing.

My one complaint is that in spite of the endless details about his life in Washington and all the people that he knew, in contrast there was very little about his time as the world's most famous children's author. I think the book would have been improved, particularly to those of us who lived and breathed his words as children, if there had been more focus on those times, instead of so much given to his earlier life. Not that those things were not important, because they were. It just felt that the end of the book was rather rushed and not so much time given over to his days as the reigning king of children's literature.

Finishing the book was a bittersweet experience for me, because I came away feeling that if I had known the man, I probably would not have liked him very much, but I continue to be grateful every day for the literature he has given the world.

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