Ripping Yarns

Years ago, in one of my every-few-years sprees of reading and re-reading Roald Dahl, I had the good luck to read his autobiography Boy, focused on his childhood growing up in the UK in the early years of the 20th century. It was, as I remember, a pretty keen and incisive take on the peculiar and rarefied world of boarding school, and it wasn't hard to find in it the roots of Dahl's fascination with childhood -- both its energetic possibilities and the limitless cruelty of children.

Going Solo picks up roughly where Boy leaves off, employing the same wide-eyed wonder as Dahl sets forth on a voyage to work for the Shell company in colonial Africa and, eventually, enlists as a fighter pilot when World War II breaks out. It's an interesting document of its time, the curiosities of which do not escape Dahl's attention. Throughout, he's overwhelmed by native culture, throwing himself into learning Swahili (and teaching his servants English, very much a taboo at the time, given the British concern about native uprisings) and fascinated by the rituals and customs of distant lands. It's classic ripping-yarns stuff, the like of which the British seem to particularly excel at, and falls prey to a certain limited condescention -- nothing in the book quite so much as Dahl's account of his house servant's bloody adventure when he hears that war has broken out against the Germans, with Dahl called away to round up the Germans in-country. There's a bemused superiority to the account of Mdisho's decapitation of a cruel neighbor German that bespeaks a certain superiority on Dahl's part. But by and large, these passages are more remarkable for Dahl's clear joy for the strangeness of the world in which he's found himself, untempered by a desire to control or correct it, eagerly dashing off whenever he gets the chance to lose himself in the unfamiliar and to escape attempts at bringing Brittain to all its empire controls.

The shift into WWII brings with it an incredibly British quality in its weary, grim clear-eyed view of the pointlessness and waste of war. Dahl is routinely stunned by the insanities of British command priorities (the bulk of the WWII fighting concerns the attempt to defend all of Brittain's forces in Greece with less than a dozen fighter pilots), occasionally takes stock at the vicious, steep bloodshed that cuts down nearly all the pilots he meets along the way, and is faced with a constant stream of inconceivable orders that follow no rational course, and have no perceivable outcome. There are no illusions here about the evils of Hitler (and there's one superb encounter Dahl has with a Jewish refugee in what will soon become Israel, in which Dahl is the butt of his own writing, ignorant at the time about the events of the Holocaust and totally clueless as to the roots of the Zionist movement) but that doesn't mean there's no gravity or weight to the horrible, gratuitous and ultimately bewildering losses sustained in the war.