I think that Boy is a lesson in economic writing. It’s certainly a challenge for the writer to try and say as much as they can in as little words as possible. Dahl, in a few pages, is able to paint a picture of his father. In a few chapters, to remind us of the torture that men his age – and a few men our age – endured at the hands of their caregivers, who were aptly named ‘masters’. It’s also a romp, a book that really shows our generation up to be a bit soft. Dahl’s romps where enabled, however, by an enviable upbringing. He was crafted confidently by a mother who seemed to have a grasp on how things should be. Who used her wealth wisely and in conjunction with the maturity that Europeans seem to apply to their childrearing. Boring, but effective.
The passage that spoke to me was on page 171, where he compared his life as a 17 year old businessman to that of a writer.
The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure wether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing leave this particular author absolutely drained. (Dahl, p. 171)
He goes onto say,
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does this to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. (Dahl, p. 172)
The only freedom any of us have is the freedom to think, it’s the one place that ‘they’ – other people clustered into varying sizes of organisation – can’t get us. Sure, they will try, play a sport and you know that groups are naturally coercive; without norms a group can’t function. Writing’s hard because you have to go to funny places, have to touch on your emotions, which can be draining. It’s hard because it’s time consuming, and exacting, and is only any good when a mountain of energy has gone into it. It requires you to expose your ego to the thoughts of others; to expose things normally private, the mental equivalent of giving people bullets to fire and claiming boldly, ‘take your best shot’!
I think the only freedom writing really offers is freedom from convention. A man who studies the human race and all it’s peculiarities is liable to understand it and, if he’s lucky, he may suffer a smidgen less, or at least suffer on his own terms with whisky glass in hand, the burden of conformity a memory.
Maybe Boy’s big idea is that of personal freedom and its changing shape, from corner store to East Africa. We are free at each point, before awareness catches up. Boarding school freed Dahl of his family; Norway of England; whisky of his doubt. And so, with each new freedom, new awareness is never far behind, and with awareness comes piece of mind and a prison with different bars… the questions that Dahl proposes then, could be, what you going to do to get out? Do you want to get out?
Dahl, R. ((1986 [19824]) Boy, Penguin.
