Madness: perfectly odd
Roald Dahl’s Madness gathers stories where strange, macabre clues are left for the reader and normal life is tilted completely awry. Kitchens, taxis, tidy townhouses — Dahl turns them into pressure cookers. There is obsession, anxiety, secrecy, and quiet cruelties, all veiled behind pretty images.
Ten stories, perfectly odd, together.
The first story, “Edward the Conqueror”, hooked me instantly. I read it in a bookshop to pass time before my fav person to ramble to picked me up, then ended up spilling the whole story to him as we walked — so caught up in my re-telling of its perfect oddness that he just smiled so widely at me rambling to him, walking. Quick kiss mid-sentence, then back to it. In the story, a woman becomes convinced her cat is the reincarnation of composer Franz Liszt after noticing it reacting strongly, fervently in cat body language (expertly told by Dahl). She learns about theories of reincarnation and studying the warts on Liszt’s faces, appearing as bumps on the cat’s face. Her husband ridicules the idea until his initial skepticism and disbelief turns into outright antagonism. With point-of-view alignment in the reader and the wife, we see what she sees, hear what she hears, and clearly are able to piece together how she arrives at the conclusion. And as a lonely woman in the house, no audience ever pauses to give her their full, undivided attention for her love of piano playing. Things spiral and become sinister.
Who controls the definition of reality in intimate relationships? This is the subtle, underwhelming question. The husband’s authority rejects his wife’s interpretations outright (and the callous actions and words he employs creates a backdrop of authority). Therefore, the ending’s act of violence from him simply comes as a logical extension of this tension.
Coming back to power imbalances, “Dip in the Pool” is about (you guessed it) yet another struggle for power (wealth). This man, a fellow transatlantic ship passenger, holds onto his sunk cost fallacy, when he places a bet of his life savings in an auction for how far the ship travels in 24 hours, convinced that the ship will encumbered by poor weather. When the weather improves and the ship clears waters rapidly, he hatches a plan of jumping into the water with one passenger witness, so they may force a rescue stop and come back for him. He has clear, internal logic, and vets the old woman on the deck with him with his own brief assessment (1) is she deaf or blind? (2) does she have a conflict of interest on the bet? He proceeds to self-congratulate his remarkable smartness. But he never realizes, and we as readers, recognize that his act is final, irreversible, and he would not be saved. Both characters face heavy flaws, perhaps reflecting the complexities of human nature in the “restless and oily” sea.
The final story, “The Way Up To Heaven”, also left me in thought. The protagonist (antihero) has anxiety that is “a tiny twitching nerve just under the skin.” She always was wishing to get to places on time, had this terrible fear of missing trains, flights, important events, put up with all the waiting her husband imposes on her, sometimes almost seemingly just to make her suffer. At some point, her abstinence from performing a simple action is clearly executed, and this inaction becomes precise, decisive action, wrapped up in politeness. The most important, crucial action happens offstage, and there is no mention of it, inferred only from a sound. The story is crafted in a procedurally clean way, with no overt mention or even hint at injustice, until the very last paragraph. There are merely some objects as tension triggers (a wrist watch, a slow elevator, a car idling). And several other stories unfold this way, only leaving those gruesome details to the readership’s imagination.
Roald Dahl. Always one of my favourite authors. I devoured everything by him growing up (one of my first big books ie. not picture books or double spaced books at the time — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and I still continue to uncover the eerie, thoughtful tales he weaves into the fabric of our consciousness.
