Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Roald Dahl's sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory may be his most under rated novel.
It sort of feels like two separate stories in one, so I'll go through both plots. The first half of the book feels almost like the plot to an episode of Rick and Morty, with Willy Wonka, Charlie and their Companions almost creating an international incident after the Great Glass Elevator goes into orbit, and they decide to board a space hotel, only to be mistaken for spies.
After Willy Wonka starts to wind up the President of the United States by pretending they are aliens, things start getting really creepy with the appearance of the Vermicious Knids, creatures that I'm almost certain scared me a lot when I was a kid.
The second part of the book takes part back at the chocolate factory, with a cautionary tale similar to those that featured in the original book. It is set off when Willy Wonka tries to get Charlie's grandparents out of bed (where they have been throughout this and the original book) so they can help run the factory, which they refuse. This prompts Willy Wonka to offer them a cure to aging, but when they abuse it, things go into the realms of fantasy.
Re-reading this book, I noticed a few things. First off, this book was first published in 1973, and seems to be influenced by politics of the time. I wondered how much the President in the book was influenced by Richard Nixon, who was President of the US when the book first came out (he looks a bit similar in the illustrations). His reaction when he thinks there are spies invading the space station is to blame the Russians (presumably because of the cold war having been recent), then the Chinese. What really struck me was when the Chinese President appears, he is written as a racist stereotype, showing how very different attitudes were, as recently as the 1970s.
Secondly, I noticed that this book is even darker than its predecessor. The Vermicious Knids super-creepy, apparently killing several characters in one scene that is described to the other characters. The book also alludes to how Willy Wonka treats the Oompa Loompas as guinea pigs, testing his products on them when he doesn't know what the results will be; in this case, he is said to have tested his anti-aging drug on more than a hundred of them, with disastrous results.
I was always sad this book hasn't yet been made into a film; Roald Dahl refused to allow it to happen after he hated the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film, and I wondered how a 70s film adaptation of this would have looked. I suspect there would have been a lot of ropey green screen effects, and the Vermicious Knids would have been stop-motion animated; in short, the film would have probably looked very naff.
Overall though, it was really good to re-read this, especially as there were some things that I had completely forgotten about.
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