If asked to select a favorite Roald Dahl work, I would be inclined to choose two: Dahl’s memoir of childhood, Boy, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, a novella and a cluster of short stories and reminiscences packaged together in a single volume. At the very least, they were the books I reread most often once I began to leave childhood behind. I liked but did not love the Dahl essentials, with their Chocolate Factories and Big Friendly Giants; they were brilliant of course but always struck my younger self as pandering to their audience just a little bit too hard. And the fictions more explicitly for adults, which I picked up later — well, they had a little too much of Dahl’s obvious delight in perversity for my staid tastes.
But the tales in Henry Sugar are poised neatly in between, more serious than Wonka and the Giant Peach, no Oompa-Loompas or annoying shouts of “Snozzcumbers!” but written in a lighter, less savage spirit than some of the adult stories, more magical-realist than macabre. I probably read the main novella — in which a layabout rich man trains himself in the powers of a Hindu sage in order to cheat at cards and ends up transforming into a globe-trotting Robin Hood, robbing casinos blind to fund a network of orphanages — at least a dozen times, and I can visualize its various set pieces as easily as any literary scene.
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