Are you sitting comfortably?
Harry Eyres
GOING SOLO by Roald Dahl
Cape, £7.95
The flyleaf of this second volume of autobiography by Roald Dahl, which deals with the time he spent in his early twenties working for Shell in East Africa, then as a fighter pilot in World War Two, lists the books he has written first 'for children', then 'for adults'. It is not clear into which category this one is meant to fail. Various aspects of its appearance — the image of Dahl on the cover as a blue-eyed Biggles with an RAF cap instead of goggles, the very large print, the inclusion of photo- graphs from Dahl's album with handwrit- ten captions — suggest the former, as does the somewhat patronising tone he uses to address the reader. (Please do not forget that in the 1930's the British Empire was still very much the British Empire').
Dahl observes people with a child's inhuman detachment: he notes external appearances and eccentricities, then labels the specimen, usually as 'stark staring' mad. People fall into predictable categor- ies: there are the barmy relics of empire encountered on the boat to Africa, who run about naked on deck or are obsessive about hair-pieces and have unbelievable names like U.N. Savory. There are brave loyal natives with splendid physiques and gleaming teeth, like the murderous Mdisho, who, when war breaks out, goes and hacks off the head of a German civilian with Dahl's well-sharpened Arabian sword. Also, it transpires, with his approval, because, after all, the German was 'an extremely unpleasant bachelor'. Germans are generally unpleasant or evil, as in the case of their leader whom Dahl refers to as Bwana Hitler, and Vichy French are naturally 'repulsive'.
Animals come more fully to life than human beings, especially when they are deadly, like the black and green mambas or dead, like the Airedale, lying sprawled on the coconut matting, for some reason quite unforgettable.
Deadliness assumes a human dimension in the second part of the book, when Dahl, with hardly any training, takes to the air as a fighter pilot. It is presented as Boys' Own heroic stuff. However, the grimness of the reality (only three out of Dahl's original training squadron of 16 survived) obtrudes through his debonair bravado and the limitations of his responses (everything is either 'rather wonderful' or 'rather hairy') to make this section, whatever the inten- tion, moving as a record of terrible human waste. The mixture of exhilaration and horror is, for once, authentic.
The perfect ease of narration and the almost suspiciously sharp vividness of re- call are so obvious and, one imagines, so guaranteed to make the book a bestseller that it seem fair to point out what Going Solo lacks. There is no trace of autobiogra- phy as Bildung, as the record of a person's inner development. There is no mention of an important personal relationship (apart from his friendship with his fellow-pilot David Coke), and just one moment of (literally) blind sexual attraction. All this takes one back to the initial point about childhood. When one thinks of Dahl's extraordinarily unpleasant, titillating `adult' stories, though, one may be grateful that he has chosen to write his auto- biography as a children's book.
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