Without supplanting either Jeremy Treglown’s pioneering Roald Dahl: A Biography (1993) or Donald Sturrock’s authorized biography, Storyteller (2010) — both of which I recommend, especially the latter — this succinct new biography provides just enough information for all but the most ardent Dahl devotee.
Elegant but somewhat glancing ... Roald Dahl...may simply be too big to cancel ... Dennison recaps most of these extraordinary events without fuss, riffling carefully through letters, diaries and other volumes, from the looks of his endnotes, but conducting no fresh interviews; there are no new revelations that I can discern, but instead refined interpretation ... In Dennison’s telling, Dahl’s contradictions are beautifully illustrated but not particularly interrogated ... I think [Dahl] would have liked Dennison’s writing style, lush but clipped, with such phrases as 'the ubiquity of caprice' and 'buoyant with slang,' full of a reader’s zest. This is not a potted biography, but it is a politely pruned one, idealism washing over the ick.
After its treatment of Dahl’s childhood, Dennison’s biography becomes over-compressed ... It lacks the warm texture of Jeremy Treglown’s 1994 biography and doesn’t have any revelations. Yet it makes you feel grudging admiration for a bully whose self-belief was, in a way, heroic.
Matthew Dennison’s Roald Dahl: Teller of the Unexpected is thin gruel. It is a stylish but curiously pointless biography, the kind that neither uncovers anything new nor casts what was already known in an interesting light…It is worth noting that Dennison is mostly a biographer of grand English ladies…and one cannot help but wonder if his latest is a chummy attempt to redeem a beloved British cultural export now that the royals have proved themselves to be beyond redemption.”
A sadness pervades this book: despair. Dahl had pockets of tenderness — he gave the fee from one magazine piece to an airman’s widow, and he tried to answer all the letters he received from children – but I think this book is a portrait of depression, which is buried rage ... This book is riveting, and immaculately written. What it lacks – probably because Dahl himself did – is a vivid inner life: it is as if he gave it all to the novels. There is something shrouded about Dennison’s account, something unspoken ... Reading Dennison’s account, all I can feel is pity, for a man so raging, and a boy so lost.
Dennison’s biography has the virtues of clarity and brevity, but despite declaring itself ‘unofficial’, which might suggest it offers shocking new revelations, it adds little to the very good duo of earlier Dahlographies.
Matthew Dennison’s new life is a well-researched, compact book drawn from the existing record. There are no new revelations or notable interviews but it turns the baggy complications of Dahl’s life into something brisk and manageable. Dennison is alive to telling detail but pulls a few punches.
Matthew Dennison’s brisk biography of Roald Dahl...gives the teller a fair trial ... It would be difficult to make Dahl dull — every quote pops from the page — but there is something workaday about Dennison’s telling. A Dahl biographer needn’t go full frobscottle and snozzcumbers, but this needs a splash more magic in the medicine.
There’s not much in Matthew Dennison’s book that you won’t find in either of those previous biographies, but that is not to dismiss the volume at hand. Here, rather, is a crisply done and well-judged survey of the outline of the life: light on close reading of the fiction, discriminating, if (to my mind) sometimes a bit too generous, in its assessment of the man ... a biography that calls its subject by his first name will tend to skew friendly, and there’s no harm in that ... Dennison makes the traditional argument for separating the art from the artist...As Matthew Dennison amply shows, Dahl’s work was intensely personal. Like many children’s writers, he wrote for and from his child self. And the spite? Well, when it comes to Dahl that’s the good stuff.
While Matthew Dennison is not as analytical as Jeremy Treglown's incisive 1994 biography and Donald Sturrock's authorised 2010 biography in 2010, he does provide an up-to-date, compact study, which balances the positives and negatives of Roald Dahl's complex life.
