My Year is not the most exciting book ever written by Roald Dahl. It is not filled with the typical wildly imaginative characters found in most books by Dahl. Nor does it present the intangibly patina of just plain strangeness which with Dahl’s books are usually endowed. The title becomes a reference to the very last year of his life since he died shortly afterward. But that is not to say it should be mistaken as a morbidly melancholic final statement by a writer fully aware death is approaching fast.
My Year is, instead, most characterized by an utter lack of what might be called Dahlesqueness, if there were such a word. Rather frenzied, it is slow-paced. Rather than macabre, it is wistfully wondrous. Rather than concerning itself with the inherent insanity of the adult world, it is persistently obsessed with the smallest and almost absurdly normal world of non-humans. The reader will not reach the end of a chapter—divided into twelve and named chronologically for the months of the year—to be presented with a twisted turn of the plot upsetting expectations. The tight construction that marks a typical Dahl tale is foregone here as the reader adopts the looser conventions of a diary or journal.
The chapter “May” begins with the author wondering why schools have dropped so much of their physical education programs from the curriculum as part of a testament to his beliefs about how much one’s character can be improved by taking part in sports. With no hint of a transitional bridge, the focus then shifts to the migratory habits of the cuckoo and its time spent in England. A touch of typical Dahl encroaches in the middle of the chapter with a portrait of the manner in which cuckoos take over the nests of hedge sparrows, but just as quickly the tone shifts again as the subject moves trees like the beech and ash and how blossoming of the hawthorn.
It is a book which hints at and obliquely suggests the idea of a man at the end of his life deciding to notice and appreciate the little things in life. Interspersed with similar observations of creatures ranging from moles to butterflies are very short sketches of recollections of the author’s past such as how Easter was spent as child, a train ride to Marseilles and the now-shocking manner in which very young British schoolboys were allowed to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day with powerful fireworks and almost no adult supervision.
Ultimately, My Year becomes a fitting cap of Dahl’s canon and career and life precisely because it is so unlike anything which comes before. Having enjoyed the wacky adventures of Wonka, the thrilling rebellion of Mr. Fox, the horrors of the Witches and the multitudinous tales which end unexpectedly, the only means really left to Dahl by which he could surprise was to do exactly the opposite. My Year is, in that particular way, peculiarly Dahlesque.
