Danny, The Champion of the World by Roald Dahl

I just finished one the best books I’ve read so far this year, Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World, my 1975 entry in A Century of Books. Over the years my children read quite a bit of Roald Dahl and I read some along with them but I had never read this one. What a larky story! Danny and his father live in a vardo, and his dad decides to go back to poaching which was a generally accepted way of life among the people, as a sport, not so much to put food on the table (although it surely evolved from that).

I haven’t discussed children’s books yet on this blog, so let me just say my daughter and I have a mutual collection of about 2000 juvenile and young adult books. My description of this collection would be that they are mostly or what I would consider classic and not much contemporary fiction. My daughter is 28 now and while she still does read some children’s works, certainly not at the rate she did as a voracious reader in elementary school. She was, like me as a young reader, hard to keep in books. I had, however, started my collection soon after I was married so she already had a pretty handy library at home, plus, lucky her, a great one at school (my school had no library).

During my only elementary years, I was allowed to buy one Scholastic book each time we had a new Scholastic reader. At least this was how I remember it. I don’t remember ever having that many books though, and we didn’t have much money, so perhaps it wasn’t every new issue I could buy something. But I do remember some of the books I had: The Boxcar Children, My Side of the Mountain, and my favorite, Snow Treasure. At some point my books had been given away or sold at a garage sale and then I realized I felt absolutely bereft. So I started collecting to fill that gap and to add others that I had read as a college student. During that time I was introduced to C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, T. H. White, Anne McCaffrey and others whose works I wanted to own. Well, more about the collecting at another time. Because I must get back to the blog writing about Danny, the Champion of the World.

This is definitely my favorite Roald Dahl of all time, although there are a few I think I have not read. But it’s one of the least zany; I think calling it larky is a good word choice. Even though it is a fairly short read, the characters of Danny and his father are rendered well and the relationship of Danny with his father is one of the loveliest, most tender father-son relationship I’ve read. Dahl’s observations bring to your mind your favorite things, some that you might have really experienced but would not be able to describe so lyrically. For example, he describes his father smile, which is also illustrative of the father-son relationship:

...He never smiled with his mouth. He did it all with his eyes. He had brilliant blue eyes and when he thought of something funny, his eyes would flash and, if you looked carefully, you could actually see a tiny golden spark dancing in the middle of each eye. But the mouth never moved. I was glad my father was an eye-smiler. It meant he never gave me a fake smile because it’s impossible to make your eyes twinkle if you aren’t feeling twinkly yourself.

The inventiveness, the beautiful, lyrical passages about outdoors are winsome.

It is the most marvelous thing to be able to go out and help yourself to your own apples whenever you feel like it. You can only do this in the autumn, of course, when the fruit is ripe, but all the same, how many families are so lucky? Not one in thousand, I would guess. Our apples were called Cox’s Orange Pippins, and I liked the sound of the name almost as much as I liked the apples.

I know a bit about this as we had raspberries in our backyard that we would eat right off the stem. Very few ever made it inside! There are lots of surprises as Danny finds out that people are not always what you expect as the secrets of the villagers play out into such a fabulous story that you just cannot put down. Who helps out with the poaching is very interesting indeed!

Danny and his father live in a “gypsy caravan,” so if it was always your secret wish to live in a vardo yourself, you will love his portrayal of the joy of this kind of life. Their vardo is stuck in one place, the wheels having rotted, but there is still that feeling that at any moment you could pack up and move all in one fell swoop. (The reason I have custody of my daughter’s part of our mutual collection is because she lived on a narrowboat for the past nine years. I think I now see the reason why the idea of living in a caravan is highly romantic, but could get tiring after a bit.) If you like caravan books, you would also enjoy Rumer Godden’s The Diddakoi. Rumer Godden is my favorite author of all time, but more on that later as well.

Please, if you have read Dahl’s other works and just thought they were too silly or “not real” as my mom would say, please pick up Danny. It is a really lovely and larky read that I would hate to have missed.