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Title: James and the Giant Peach
Author: Roald Dahl
Publication Date: 1961 (novel), 2022 (audio)
Producer: Penguin Audio
Narrated by: James Acaster
Recording Time: 2 hours, 49 minutes
THE PLOT:
via wiki
James Henry Trotter lives happily with his parents in a house by the sea in the south of England. When he is four years old, a rhinoceros escapes from London Zoo and eats James’ parents whilst they are on a shopping trip in London. He ends up in the care of his two cruel aunts, Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge, who physically and verbally abuse him, isolate him in their “queer ramshackle house on the top of a high hill”[b], dole out sadistic punishments for the smallest infractions, force him to sleep on bare floorboards in a prison cell-like room, and force him to do heavy chores that they never bother doing themselves (instead of by his real name, they call him insults like “you disgusting little beast” or “you miserable creature”).
One day, after James has been living with his aunts for about three years, when he is sent behind a clump of laurel bushes for only requesting a day trip to the seaside, he meets a mysterious man who gives him a bag of magical crystals, instructing James to use them in a potion that will change his life for the better. While returning home, James stumbles and spills the bag on the ground, losing the crystals as they dig themselves underground next to a nearby barren peach tree. Immediately, the tree, in turn, produces a single peach which soon grows to the size of a house. The next day, Spiker and Sponge build a fence around it and earn money by selling viewing tickets to tourists; James is locked in the house, only able to see the peach and the crowds through the bars of his bedroom window.
After the tourists have gone, James is told to clean the rubbish around the peach and finds a hole inside it. He crawls in, through a tunnel, and finds himself in a room, in the enlarged peach pit; where he meets Centipede, Miss Spider, Old Green Grasshopper, Earthworm, Ladybug, Glowworm, and Silkworm who become his friends and express their dreams of leaving Spiker and Sponge’s hill as their lives, like James’, have been made miserable by the two aunts.
The next day, Centipede cuts the stem of the peach, causing it to roll away and crush James’ aunts to death. After leaving behind a trail of destruction (including crashing through a chocolate factory[c]), it reaches the sea and is surrounded by ravenous sharks. James uses Miss Spider and Silkworm to make threads, while Earthworm is used as bait and draws 501 seagulls[7] to the peach, whereupon the threads are tied on their necks. The peach is lifted off the water. High above the clouds, during the journey, while James learns about his friends’ lives before they encountered each other, the Centipede accidentally falls overboard, but gets rescued by James.
That night, the peach encounters the Cloud-Men, who are portrayed as responsible for weather phenomena like hailstorms and rainbows. Centipede mocks the Cloud-Men, who throw things at the group until they get clear. The peach briefly gets entangled in the ropes holding up a rainbow, making a Cloud-Man jump onto one of the seagull strings, which the Centipede cuts loose. In retaliation for the loss of one of their friends, the Cloud-Men hurl cans of rainbow paint, which coat the Centipede in fast-drying rainbow paint that freezes him into a statue. Afterwards, the travelers barely escape the Cloud-Men’s faucets that make the rain, which frees the Centipede. Almost before dawn, as they leave the Cloud-Men’s homes behind, the group briefly encounters a giant bat.
At about dawn, James sees that the group has reached New York City and arranges for some seagulls to be let loose for them to land. After doing so, however, the wing of a passing plane severs the rest of the strings, and the falling peach lands on the spire of the Empire State Building. It is mistaken for a bomb at first and then a spaceship, resulting in the arrival of police and firemen. Calming the crowd, James tells his story, and becomes friends with many children in New York; they eat the peach and James and his friends get their own jobs, now residing in Central Park, in the pit of the peach. As James gets many requests to tell about his adventures on the giant peach, he resolves to write a book about it and does so, revealing to the reader that they have just finished reading the very book.
My Review:
I never read James and the Giant Peach when I was young, so this was the first time for me to hear this story. I was not surprised to learn that this is a book about an orphan, because apparently the only type of children’s lit that gets published involves the untimely death of a child’s parents. I was further not surprised to learn that James, the protagonist, was abused and mistreated in his new home by his relatives. That is also true to the children’s lit form. And I was also not surprised to learn that James was rescued from his circumstances by a bit of benevolent witchcraft, whereafter he makes lifelong friends with a crew of misfits.
James and the Giant Peach, it is fair to say, is a bit formulaic, but I suppose the formula is the formula because it continues to resonate.
James and the Giant Peach is like a precursor to Harry Potter, but for a much younger reader. Or maybe you could say it’s Cinderella but for boys. Either way, it is a story that will feel structurally very familiar to anyone who reads it. The thing that sets the story apart is the unexpected aesthetic silliness of the whole thing. We don’t have a traditional witch, wizard, or standard potion. We have wriggling and magical alligator tongues. We don’t have other misfit children, or traditionally cute talking mammals. James’ new friends are gigantic scary-looking insects. James doesn’t escape to a new and better places via a typical fairy tale mechanism. He escapes inside the pit of an enormous peach, and then floats and flies across the Atlantic Ocean. Dahl doesn’t reinvent the fairy tale with this book. He paints it with vibrant new colors and new scenery. A fairy tale feels like it belongs in the rural English countryside where this tale starts. It feels decidedly out-of-place atop a New York City skyscraper, where it finishes. And yet, it works. Perhaps I’m drawing a meatal connection due to a similarity in names, but James and the Giant Peach feels like the children’s fairy tale version of a Dali painting. The forms are familiar, but they are bent in entertaining new ways. You could probably fairly compare this in terms of style to Dr. Seuss, but with less rhyming.
Do I recommend this book for children? I actually struggled with that. A lot of British children’s lit is somewhat free with swearing, so you get a couple of those words in the tale (though not many.) If that’s a strict rule at your house, you’ll want to preview the book first. As you might have guessed from how this review began, I am not a fan of aiming every children’s lit story at the topic of death, grief, abuse, and escape. We get that here. Then, as part of his escape inside the peach, James literally witnesses his two abusive aunts being crushed to death by the peach as rolls away. That’s played for a combination of justice and comedy… but it’s also a bit dark, I think. On the journey, he hears multiple accounts from his insect companions about suffering and death (bugs tend to be squished so personifying them brings out those stories.) There’s more to life than that and there should be more to escapism than pep talks for future orphanhood.
I am also not a fan of “normalizing” witchcraft – even benevolent witchcraft. Dahl puts the reality of that at a distance, by making it sillier, which I appreciated. It’s much closer to magic beans than an ancient-seeming person turning who knows what inside a cauldron. The recent news cycle has brought to light that world leaders and celebrities participate in this type of thing, and we should not expose our children to this reality in a way that makes it seem attractive. On the other hand, as this is a thing out in the world, a story like this represents an opportunity to have some conversations with your child while said child is still willing to listen to your parental opinion. (If perhaps you need backup, you can get your kid to listen to the great Sir Christopher Lee.)
Most of this is handled with care throughout the book, such that the weight of the events being described isn’t put too heavily onto the heart of the reader. And yet the topics are still present. Ultimately, I conclude that this book is probably best told to children who are too young to really absorb much more than the story’s silliness, or to kids who aren’t super sensitive. Use your best judgment.
Overall, I enjoyed the book even as a adult. I particularly liked the mental image of the giant peach being stuck on the pointy end at the top of the Empire State Building. The audio recording – complete with occasional count effects – was really well done and I thoroughly enjoyed James Acaster’s narration.
Have you read James and the Giant Peach? If so, what did you think?
