The Witches
A young boy and his Norwegian grandmother, who is an expert on witches, together foil a witches' plot to destroy the world's children by turning them into mice.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
6people
2016–2026years
33% recommend50% neutral17% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Roald Dahl has been great for the whole family, we do a lot of driving and listen to them in the car. We are very picky about the narrator's voice. Best so far have been The Witches (Miranda Richardson), Matilda (Kate Winslet) and the BFG (David Walliams - I don't like him personally but he is a great reader). Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a disappointment, the narrator garbles and throws away the lines.
Also David Tennant reading the How To Train Your Dragon series. He is a superb reader with an amazing range. Before he hit the big time with Dr Who he did a lot of radio.
We've also had family members record stories and I've put them onto cards. We gave my son a dictaphone to record his own stuff. He would do great long sagas of mayhem and battle, but he's lost interest in recent months.
- I had no idea The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar was for adults. I read that when I was only eight or so after reading other Dahl books like Matilda and The Witches. I loved the premise.
- The rewrite of the Oompa Loompas is different for two reasons: it was Dahl’s own rewrite, not performed by a soulless corporation; and it made the text better, not worse.
Even an author’s own revisions can be heavily criticized when they diminish the quality of the original work. Witness the Star Wars special editions, which aside from making questionable edits to dialogue and pacing, also jammed in incongruous CGI effects that stick out like a sore thumb, making the films feel inconsistent, and though perhaps the CGI was cutting edge for its time, in retrospect those effects have not aged nearly as well as the original effects, which were cutting edge for their time.
The Puffin changes are similar in kind. Roald Dahl as an author is known for his dark humor and misanthropic themes. Throwing in a moralizing sermonette in The Witches (whose eponymous witches are bald) that “there are plenty of other reasons why women might wear wigs and there is certainly nothing wrong with that” is unnecessary and inconsistent with the tone of the original work. Meanwhile, Dahl’s own moral points are obfuscated or eliminated. Dialing down Augustus Gloop’s obesity interferes with his purpose as a lesson on gluttony; cutting out Mike Teevee’s obsession with guns dampens the consequences of his obsession with television. George Kranky’s grandmother was such an unpleasant person that she was never really missed after he murdered her—well, that point’s not made anymore.
Then there are more minor changes, unremarkable physical descriptions that are apparently no longer acceptable coming from a mainstream publisher. Describing Miss Spider’s black head, or Earthworm’s lovely pink skin. Scared people who are white as a sheet. Tall skinny Bean and dwarfish pot‐bellied Bunce. What once were colorful descriptions (often literally) are replaced with bland unremarkable alternatives, not because anyone of consequence took offense, but because whatever company the publishers contracted this “modernization” task to wanted to justify its paycheck.
And the worst of it is that the rightsholders are the ones doing it. The Bowlders who first Bowlderized Shakespeare were resoundly made fun of for their delicate sensibilities, but I don’t really take issue with them, because they were just a family sharing with others how Shakespeare could look according to their tastes. No adult was deprived of Shakespeare by the Bowlders.
The situation is different here because had it not been for the vociferous outcry you complain about, the originals would no longer be available to anybody. Due to the public response, now they’ve said they’ll continue providing uncensored versions (whether they’ll keep that promise remains to be seen). Had readers shrugged and moved on, the censors would have won, and we would see these changes more and more throughout the publishing industry. But now maybe there’s a chance that this trend will change direction: that the industry will regain its faith in normal people to read books from another era without having to be coddled.
- > As a wheelchair user, I could not help noticing that the original Bond books had, shall we say, an interesting relationship to embodied difference. It was a feature of Fleming’s writing that would be all but impossible to alter through the interventions of a sensitivity reader, hired by the publisher to make the books more palatable to contemporary readers. Fleming’s attitude to disability was encoded not only in words and phrases, but in characterisation and plot – that is, in the stories’ most fundamental qualities.
And this is precisely why the whole endeavor is so misguided! The values of the author are embedded in their stories; you can't just "fix" those stories with a few tweaks and a puff of magic smoke.
It would be much better, I'd think, to just accept the original works for what they are: the imperfect creations of complicated people.
This applies to Roald Dahl too, by the way. IMO, The Witches is an inherently mysogonistic story beyond what any number of light edits can change. That doesn't mean nobody should read it, and in fact, I think a children's book like The Witches is a great opportunity to teach kids to be critical of what they read. What does this book teach us? Which of those lessons are good, and which are not? Why?
- Reminds me of Roald Dahl's 'The Witches', oh and Toy Story.
- I've been going through Roald Dahl with my 5-year-old and it's been delightful. It has kind of made me want to do my own audiobook recording of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. James and the Giant Peach was a hit, of course, as was Matilda. We're doing The Witches right now, which I had never read as a kid. It's kind of at the edge of what my son finds too scary, though.
My son has started to notice that all of Dahl's heroes have terrible family lives in some way, and he's questioned why it's necessary. I think he starts to worry that it might happen to him. I've tried to explain to him that, because the stories aren't real (which is a concept he's comfortable with already), it's a useful shortcut for a writer to make us sympathetic to them. I think he gets it.
