Paris Girls
Considering that the most accurate description of this book is a “sex romp” can should be prepared to expect plenty of imagery related to sexual activity. This not synonymous with saying that Roald Dahl has produced a work of pornography, however. In fact, if one remains unsure of the difference, the following imagery should reveal the difference:
“Let me just say that every rumour I had ever heard about the girls of Paris was substantiated during those few hours I spent with Mademoiselle Nicole. She made the glacial London débutantes seem like so many slabs of petrified wood. She went for me like a mongoose for a cobra. She suddenly had ten pairs of hands and half a dozen mouths. She was a contortionist to boot, and more than once, amidst the whirring of limbs, I caught a glimpse of her ankles locked around the back of her neck.”
Medical Lingo
It is amazing how effectively just a few words of medical lingo—or even just stuff that sounds like medical lingo—into a procedural paragraph can become imagery that makes the entire process sound like it makes sense regardless of whether it does or doesn’t. As a cool experiment in creative writing, insert imaginary jargon of your own making into this paragraph and determine the length one must go to transform it into mumbo-jumbo:
“Pill making is a simple matter if you know how. The calcium carbonate, which is neutral and harmless, comprises the bulk of the pill. You then add the precise quantity by weight of the active ingredient, in my case cantharidin powder. And finally, as an excipient, you put in a little tragacanth. An excipient is simply the cement that makes everything stick together and harden into an attractive pill. I added a few drops of cochineal, And each one, if I had done my weighing and mixing properly, contained exactly the amount of cantharidin powder that would lie on top of a pinhead.”
Whine People
The novel is filled with digressions and, unfortunately, one of those digressions reveals Oswald to be a member of that most tedious sector of civilization so far yet devised by human interest: wine people. . Oswald’s digression does have one saving grace, however: it is actually not as boring to hear as grass growing is to watch:
“We watched the grapes being pressed in gigantic wooden screw presses that required six men to turn the screw. We saw the juice being run off from the presses into the great wooden vats…we saw the grape juice coming alive in the colossal twelve-foot-high wooden vats, boiling and bubbling as it began its own magic process of converting sugar into alcohol. And while we actually stood there watching, the wine became so fiercely active and the boiling and bubbling reached such a pitch of frenzy that several men had to climb up and sit upon the cover of each vat to hold it down.”
The Geniuses
The plot of the book has Yasmin using her feminine wiles to deliver drugged chocolates to men identified as geniuses for the purposes of collecting their sperm in order to build a eugenics bank of genetic material. Or something like that. Anyway, the storyline for the second half the book is essentially a series of repetitive meetings with famous historical characters whom Yasmin seduces and drugs. Or, boiled down to efficient imagery of geniuses away from the work at which they are geniuses: “You have a bunch of supremely gifted and therefore hyperactive artists, loaded with the very finest Sudanese Blister Beetle, who find themselves staring goggle-eyed at a young female of indescribable beauty. They were jiggered. They were scrambled and dished up on buttered toast from the moment they swallowed the fatal chocolate.”
