The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl
As a child I was enthralled with Roald Dahl’s Hammer House of Horror series on the TV, as a father I delighted in reading all his children’s books, and now I got to his short stories for adults - The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar – collection. In addition to (spoiler alert) the card-trick-yogi being a modern reincarnation of Robin Hood converting money from casinos into orphanages, he has six other stories – all worth reading.
The magic of these stories is the elegance of the plot and the way the main characters effortlessly weave the story. Seven stories like seven rivers or streams. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is definitely a river in this classification, undulating from beginning with a bored rich English bachelor who cheats on his friends, to an Indian who is more than a conjurer, to the temptation and metamorphosis of Henry Sugar. (Spoiler alert: he doesn't sell his soul like Doctor Faustus, and doesn’t turn into a cockroach; it is almost the opposite).
The Hitch-hiker, The Boy Who Talked to Animals and The Swan are more like fast moving streams. Each treat honour and danger in different ways. The Swan was for me the most terrifying – a tale of two extraordinary bullies and their victim.
The collection also contains two non-fiction pieces - The Mildenhall Treasure and A Piece of Cake. The Mildenhall Treasure is more a slow-moving river - an honourable farmer ploughs a field and… I won’t say more. Read it. A Piece of Cake is the story that launched Roald Dahl’s career and is about the author’s plane crash in the war, echoing (in a very different way), the crash of Antoine de Saint Exupery, or the artist Joseph Beuys. Three amazing artistic careers were launched by these near-death experiences. Not to be recommended as a means of literary or artistic development of course!
The collection also contains advice from Roald Dahl on writing and how he became a writer, and his childhood at school, which reminds us that schools aren’t what they used to be; in this case that is a good thing.
So, for writers looking for tools of the craft – Roald Dahl’s advice is to find a good plot. Keep paper handy and write down plots when they come to you. A sentence can be enough, even a single word - seeds for future stories.
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Top reviews from other countries
laxschrift
Great but not recommended for children
Reviewed in Germany on February 25, 2017
Corrina
Best Stories I ever Read as a Child
Reviewed in Canada on September 22, 2021
