Due to the presence of witches, gremlins, Oompa-Loompas and various assorted anthropomorphic animals—not to mention the cast of crazies that populate his short stories for a more mature audience—Roald Dahl is not usually viewed as one of those writers whose fiction is particularly informed by autobiography. Going Solo, the author’s memoir of his young adulthood spent in Africa, should be enough to call that view into question by any reader familiar with even his more imaginative short stories.
The one aspect that is most pervasive and persistently present throughout the text is the constant reminder of the link between fact and fiction and between the world of reality and the imaginative pursuits it stimulates. Dahl’s fiction for both older readers and kids is typically characterized using words like grotesque and macabre and the world of reality he conveys in this autobiographical tome is every bit as grotesque and macabre as his fiction.
Things start off merely bizarre: Dahl lying in his bunk on a ship when a figure of a man “naked as a jungle ape” runs past, soon joined by the figure of an equally nude woman. Transforming this imagery into full-scale realm of the macabre is that the two figures turn out to be a Major in the British military and his wife! From there, the story of Dahl’s sojourn in Africa first as an employee for Shell Oil and then as a member of the Royal Air Force becomes the very stuff of fiction. He witnesses what is later described as an event unparalleled in the history of all who heard about it: a woman being dragged away from a village clutched in the jaws of a lion who not only survived the experience, but walked away virtually unscathed.
Later, he witnesses a face-to-face showdown between a native man and one of the world’s most dangerous snakes, the black mamba. Again, the animal fails to bring about the expected terror, but the horror of the victory of the human is dreadful enough to inspired nightmares. Once Dahl’s African stories transplant into the world of World War II, things almost settle into a more mundanely nightmarish world. After all, what writer who lived through war didn’t eventually write about it. Only it turns out that Dahl’s war stories are dotted with equally strange and unusual little incidents that separate them from the pack.
If it is true that all fiction is to some extent based on autobiographical reality, then Roald Dahl’s grotesque and macabre works and characters can easily be viewed as traceable back to his youth. The stories which make up this volume and the one immediately preceding which details an often horrific childhood spent among sadistic adults and kids at boarding school all retroactively point forward to an prodigious output of fiction informed by cruel adults, spoiled kids, animals, airplanes and naked adults. Every single one of which recurs persistently throughout the works of Roald Dahl.
