Africa
This memoir of Dahl’s early adulthood takes place when he was in Africa working for Shell Oil and then later when training as a pilot during World War II. The previous memoir of his childhood ended on the note of Dahl’s exclamation of joy upon finding out he was being stationed in Africa by Shell: “Lions! And elephants and giraffes and coconuts everywhere!” The manner in which the “theme” of Africa which permeates through this book is really best expressed through his creative writing in which those very elements of excitement repeatedly show up. African animals pop up in his children’s stories and poems again and again the excitement of a brand new world capable of sparking his imagination is reflected in the imaginative words he created time and again for his young readers.
Life During Wartime
The first half of the book explores Dahl’s going solo for the first time in his life. Away from parental observation and freed from the authoritarianism of the British school system, not only was he a young man experiencing independence for really the first time, but he was doing so half a world away from his home. This independence is cut short, of course, by the outbreak of World War II and soon enough he finds himself right back under an authoritarian regime known as the Royal Air Force. As he observes in a short prefatory introduction, the first half of the book required judicious choices to be made so that only the most exciting parts made it in while flying for the RAF required no such decision-making because every day presented something worthy of exploring through literary recollection. As with every other writer who served during WWII, the theme of life during wartime is also really about how his experiences would later serve his literary pursuits in the form of stimulating ideas that increased his writing output.
Storytelling
While Going Solo is a memoir of a certain time and location in the author’s life as a young man, he is not the star of every page or even every chapter. Many of the chapters revolve around a specific incident—a dramatic occurrence that Dahl witnesses first-hand though often is not at all involved in as an active participant. In a sense, then, this memoir at times reads more like one of his collections of short stories. Among the highlight include a terrifying scene in which a woman is dragged off clutched in the jaws of a lion (and survives!), a showdown between a one of the most fearless snakes on the planet—a black mamba—and a native man prepared to survive the encounter and a host of thrilling war adventures. Ultimately, the theme of the book remains implicit, but almost impossible to overlook: for a writer, absolutely every moment is potentially material capable of being spun into a story.
