You can have your hobbits and your underage wizards all you want. Roald Dahl was the writer of my childhood. Not even Charlie & the Chocolate Factory. Not Matilda. Not BFG. Rather, it was "Man from the South". "Pig". "The Great Switcheroo". Come to think of it, My Uncle Oswald was where I got my first sexual education, and "Lamb to the Slaughter" was where I learned about the craft of writing a short story.
A childhood that was seriously compromised years later, the day that I found out about fatwa against Salman Rushdie. This despicable act should have put an end to human dealings with any form of religion, but in fact it had its vocal supporters not just among Muslims but in the western world, too. And while I never cared for John le Carré (The Little Drummer Girl made little impression on me), Roald Dahl was a different story altogether. Here was someone who shaped my formative years a lot more than I cared to admit.
Yet what was I supposed to make of him, in the post-fatwa world? Dahl endorsed this vile condemnation (which was basically an incitement to murder) of an artist whose guilt consisted in writing a novel. It was a huge blow, and I had no idea how to reconcile this shameful fact with my love for Roald Dahl the writer. Later on, I would learn to separate biography from work (I would enjoy some of Ezra Pound's poems and I would rewatch those early films by Nikita Mikhalkov), but at the time the defence mechanisms just weren't there.The question of how to treat an artist's work in view of their life remains a key one. And I think I did get to the bottom of it a few years later, in a London bookstore. I found the Salman Rushdie section (being a fan of Midnight's Children as well as his short story collection East, West), and saw one book missing. It was of course The Satanic Verses. By that time, Mohammad Khatami had spoken about the fatwa being 'finished', and yet the novel was nowhere to be seen. I kept looking and in the end I dug out The Satanic Verses from under a few layers of other books.
I read it soon afterwards, and loved it so much that years later, when I finally had the courage to reread "Galloping Foxley", I did so with ease. The short story did not produce any fresh stirrings inside (none of Dahl's work ever would), although I did admire the twist at the end. It was a good twist, but it only remained relevant within the context of my first encounter with Roald Dahl.
