William and Mary by Roald Dahl (1959) | Hacker News Reader

William and Mary by Roald Dahl (1959)

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91 pointsmattbee32 comments

Although known for his children’s books, his writing for adults is hilarious. The children’s books have a dark edge to them, but the adult writing is fully suffused with it. They definitely adult, very dark, and let his twisted humor run riot.

Well worth the read, they had me in tears.

The New Yorker has a nice over view: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/roald-dahls-twis...

Someone Like You is a favourite. Everybody jinks..

I love his adult writing style and recently enjoyed the quadruple of Wes Anderson shorts/TV plays that are available on Netflix if you know to look for them.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

The Rat Catcher

The Swan

Poison

(Put in order of my enjoyment of them)

I’ve loved Henry Sugar since the 70s but assumed any video adaptation would make a mess of it - thankfully the Wes Anderson film is wonderful.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but then I like Wes Anderson's style.

I've similarly been a Dahl fan since the 70s and almost grew up on Tales of the Unexpected. The theme tune is certainly memorable.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075592/

While I enjoyed the Anderson adaptation, it failed to convey the essential part of the story which captured my imagination as a child: the idea presented at the very end of the story that everything the reader had read was real, true. That Henry Sugar had in fact existed, as a person, and Roald Dahl was contacted to tell his story and spread the word.

Ultimately, by stylizing the story as a play, tearing down the fourth wall constantly, it removes that essential bit of verisimilitude. Still enjoyable, amazing acting, charming plots, but less MAGICAL.

Excerpt: “But how do I … happen to know all this? And how did I come to write the story in the first place? I will tell you. Soon after Henry's death, John Winston telephoned me from Switzerland. He introduced himself simply as the head of a company calling itself ORPHANAGES S.A., and asked me if I would come out to Lausanne to see him with a view to writing a brief history of the organization. I don't know how he got hold of my name. He probably had a list of writers and stuck a pin into it. He would pay me well, he said. And he added. "A remarkable man has died recently. His name was Henry Sugar. I think people ought to know a bit about what he has done."In my ignorance, I asked whether the story was really interesting enough to merit being put on paper. "All right," said the man who now controlled one hundred and forty-four million pounds. "Forget it. I'll ask someone else. There are plenty of writers around." That needled me. "No," I said. "Wait. Could you at least tell me who this Henry Sugar was and what he did? I've never even heard of him." In five minutes on the phone, John Winston told me something about Henry Sugar's secret career. It was secret no longer. Henry was dead and would never gamble again. I listened, enthralled. "I'll be on the next plane," I said.” …. “ "One last question," I said. "You keep calling him Henry Sugar. And yet you tell me that wasn't his name. Don't you want me to say who he really was when I do the story?" "No," John Winston said. "Max and I promised never to reveal it. Oh, it'll probably leak out sooner or later. After all, he was from a fairly well-known English family. But I'd appreciate it if you don't try to find out. Just call him plain Mr Henry Sugar." And that is what I have done.”

Don't they cover that bit at the end?

Yes, they did.

“The Champion of the World” is the 1959 New Yorker piece that is the precursor to “Danny the Champion of the World”. I’m a subscriber, but, without searching too hard, haven’t found a find non-scanned text.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1959/01/31/the-champion-o...

I was dreading what Netflix were going to do with the Dahl books. I was sure they would balls them up and make them, for want of a better word, ...Netflixy.

Wes Anderson[1] is just a perfect fit though. The shorts are so, so good. Everything about them is spot on. The casting, the sets, everything.

I couldn't imagine anyone doing a better job and I hope they do more.

Of the current run, I'd pick The Swan myself but I reorder my favourites every time I rewatch them.

1. My bias is that I've never seen a Wes Anderson film I didn't think was magic.

> My bias is that I've never seen a Wes Anderson film I didn't think was magic

Me too - I think he's getting better over time though and I'd love to see more Dahl adaptations by him. He really lets the writing shine through.

Can you tell me what you liked so much about The Swan? It was my least favorite by a huge margin and I'm genuinely interested to hear the opposite opinion.

Good question.

I think because it reminds me of a stage production the most of all the shorts.

I'm not sure I'm articulate enough to really explain this but the deliberate, stylistic break in reality brings me back to being read stories as a kid. It's like in Princess Bride when the granddad stop narrating to ask Kevin if he's getting too excited.

Or Jim Henson taking off a puppet to break character. He'd just drop that muppet on the table. The listening kids don't care, they can see it's just a toy. When he puts it on his hand again, it comes back to life. That break in the narrative just enhances the effect.

Kids don't care when it's laying limp on the table. They instinctively know it's the story teller that brings it to life.

Wes Anderson does that, over and over, like with the doors opening in a hedge to had props to the actors.

I know that's an affectation, and one that's easy to over do, but Wes Anderson nails it IMHO.

FWIW, many Dahl stories including William and Mary were made into TV episodes. They're probably online somewhere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tales_of_the_Unexpecte...

Don't read that if you don't want a spoiler.

if you weren't aware henry sugar has an accurate description of a remote viewing experience, popularised by the cia's declassified project stargate. If it's not a true story it might as well be.

I would say he is more known for his children's books. But he's pretty well known for his adult stories as well. He was such a tragically flawed person, and was clearly unhappy and unsatisfied most of his life. This is a lot of what makes his writing so deliciously and darkly humorous, but the actual tale of his life has always been depressing to me rather than funny.

I’m rather fond of his autobiographies, “Boy” and “Going Solo”, the latter having a great audiobook recording by Andrew Sachs I believe.

Roald Dahl is such as clever, fascinating author. I cannot get over the fact that he essentially predicted large language models, and some societal implications of such models, in "The Great Automatic Grammatizator", written in 1954!

https://d-a-v-e.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/The_Great_...

From that story,

> "For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

> “Where?”

> “In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

It's a strange specific pleasure to read things uploaded on edu personal websites, texts that someone copied out by hand into their word processor in the 90's, complete with `<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="Microsoft Word 97">`

Unfortunately this is a pretty bad copy of the text. I recommend seeking out a better version. It's from the collection Kiss Kiss, a scan of which is available on archive.org

There are obvious formatting issues and a slew of typos, but there are also whole missing sentences, and the last line has been miscopied as

> 'Isn't he sweet?' she cried, looking up at Landy with big bright eyes. 'Isn't he heaven? I just can't wait to get him home.'

instead of

> 'Isn't he sweet?' she cried, looking up at Landy with big bright eyes. 'Isn't he lovely? I just can't wait to get him home.'

I've put up a better copy from _Kiss Kiss_: https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1960-dahl-will...

The website belongs to a beloved professor of mine from my early years into learning computer science. He also was the head of Turkish olympiad team in informatics.

That version is missing some of the text. At least the paragraph starting "Perhaps I should explain to you here that although John Landy has". A bunch of other copies I found were also missing that paragraph.

I found an audio version on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-SrS15vb8 that had the missing paragraph (starting at 8 minutes in).

I must have read this when I was 12; the image of the eyeball and the smoke lived in my head rent-free. I was reminded of it by that creepy-ass bio-CPU company we discussed earlier (also by Lena...).

“because your silly little pancreas is riddled with cancer” is such a classic Dahl delivery. He’s one of the few authors that can actually make me laugh out loud.

Would be a good piece for a university course about ethics in AI. Pair it with "Lena" by qntm to present two sides of the same nightmare.

I remember hearing a radio 4 version of this in the 80s as a kid, and the bit about peeling his skull like an orange really freaked me out, was just thinking about this the other day.

It is an interesting question to think about how long this system could be maintained. I think Dahl's estimate of 2 centuries is high, even with today's technology.

The real-life modern counterpart to Roald Dahl's fantasy machine is ECMO (extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation). It works almost exactly the same as the device from the story. The longest that a person has survived on ECMO so far is a little over 300 days [1], but that's with the entire body hooked up to the machine, not just the brain.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5474617/

Hell, that's the other one. For both of them. William's hell is obvious. Mary's hell is being reminded for the rest of her life that she never rebelled because she was too much of a coward, and that all she has left in her remaining time is a pathetic revenge on someone who can no longer fight back. Every time she makes fun of William, she will remember that. Pretty Existentialist.

"The Way Up to Heaven" is an other one in the same spirit...

Excellent

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