BOOKS + SOCIETY

How Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Made Me a Lifelong Socialist

Or at least the first couple of pages did

Nothing but cabbage soup for supper. Not as some January detox fad, but every day. Forever. With no hope of anything more appetising or nourishing.

And not as a punishment for some grievous deed, either. Just because.

Because you and your family were unlucky enough to be born poor. Into a society that would ensure you remained that way for the rest of your life. Doling out in exchange for your drudgery the few pennies you needed to keep you from starving to death.

Not out of any sense of kindness, fairness or even pity. Just to give you the strength to clock on again tomorrow, to screw another thousand caps onto another thousand tubes of toothpaste. Until you were so ground down that you took to your bed and awaited the merciful release of a pauper’s grave.

That was the life that awaited Charlie if he made it to adulthood.

The life, it dawned on me, as I turned those first few pages of Roald Dahl’s most famous work, that awaited those less fortunate than my comfortable middle-class self. Those that had not received one of the tickets in the great lottery of capitalism.

I have been haunted by that meagre, foul-smelling cabbage soup all my privileged life. It told me everything I needed to know about injustice and inhumanity. About the identity of our collective enemy.

Rather than the comical Oompa-Loompas, the fanciful confectionery or grotesquely monstrous children, that was what I took home with me from my childhood tour of Mr Wonka’s fabled factory.

And so when I read John Pearce’s article about three books that changed the way you see the world, I didn’t hesitate to put Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in first place.

Yet it even struck me as a somewhat surprising choice. I read voraciously as a child and teenager, studied languages and literature at school and university, and continued my literary leaning into adulthood.

I’d studied Sartre and Voltaire, Nietzsche and Goethe, Unamuno and Borges. Yet it was a kids’ fantasy about an eccentric chocolatier I read at the age of maybe 7 or 8 that I felt had made the greatest impression on my worldview.

On reflection, it shouldn’t be all that surprising. I remembered several years ago a piece that the British liberal newspaper The Guardian published for World Book Day, in which they had asked a dozen or so famous figures to name the books that they most loved or admired.

Many of them were children’s books — I think Roald Dahl featured on a couple of other lists as well. The journalist had laudably not confined the survey to more literary figures, their fellow metropolitan culture vultures. The kind of people who might have achieved the odyssean feat of actually reading Ulysses. Or at least mugged up enough to blag that they had.

There were instead sportspeople, daytime TV presenters, school dropouts made good. A more balanced cross-section of society, as befitted a day intended to promote universal reading habits.

Quite a few of the interviewees acknowledged that they had read little in their later teenage and adult years — English literature class as school would have successfully snuffed out any love of letters — but they all had at least a childhood story that remained close to their hearts.

And it struck me that this made children’s literature all the more powerful and influential.

First of all, because as people grow older, the available target audience for any given book becomes narrower and narrower. Some fall by the wayside, and give up reading altogether. Others simply don’t have the time, beset by the pressures of making a crust, or distracted by circus lights. But even those who do read splinter off into their own narrow niches and genres.

If you want to convey a universal message, a plucky fox stands a better chance than a post-modern treatise.

Those of a bookish bent would do well to remember that we are and always will be in a minority. A dwindling minority at that, as more eye-catching ‘content delivery systems’ than the printed page complete their global domination. The clock is tik-tokking.

But there is also another reason to turn to children’s literature in an attempt to shape hearts and minds in the interests of the commonweal. Children have a more heightened sense of injustice than any other segment of society. Inevitably so, for they are more directly and comprehensively exposed to its scourge than other cohorts of the population.

They are institutionalised from an early age, placed under rigid and illogical commandments barked by schoolteachers, subjected to arbitrary punishments with no semblance of rigorous investigation, cross-examination or right of appeal.

Children innately know, or rapidly learn, what is fair and unfair. They crave recognition of that sense of natural justice. To hear an adult from the other side of the cell bars say ‘Yes, I hear you. This sucks.’ and ideally to offer some means of redemption, some signpost or trail through the disturbing forest that lies ahead.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory doesn’t do that, of course. Finding a golden lottery ticket and simply not being among the most obnoxious 80% of the population is hardly a viable path to overcome the frustrations and unfairnesses of life. And I doubt that Dahl would in any event have been of the political persuasion to suggest the remedies that I would like to see pursued.

But he did an outstanding job of telling it like it is. Exaggerated and stylised, naturally. Nonetheless, an image that fundamentally rings true enough for young readers to make the connection to the world around them, and to reach their own conclusions as to what might be wrong with it. And what needs putting right.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

And it smells of cabbage soup.

Even a child can tell that.