Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsHmm ...
Reviewed in India 🇮🇳 on 19 May 2022
Always, underneath the apparent comic humour of Dahl’s novels, there lies a drollery with double-entendres and twisted innuendos. Such is the dark humour of Dahl. Nonetheless, The Twits, with its visual grotesque and ridiculous tirade between an unpleasant couple, are no exception. But Dahl’s parochial outlook is problematic. The outright discriminations are based on puerile medieval thought based upon imposed moralisations, not ethics, which again, brings us to the question: To what extent can a child get conditioned by it? We must remember that books can advocate propaganda (not always an agitprop) and, it can become a manifesto. Without casting the book aside or labelling it as some sort of anti-humanistic work, it can be said, that due to its problematic nature, Dahl’s work becomes open to a discourse, not just of base and stupid revulsion against his prejudices, which we already know of, but rather probing into the subtleties of the text and how could it function as Children’s Literature, which brings us to yet another simple question: What exactly is Children’s Literature?
