The Rich Are Not Like People
F. Scott Fitzgerald famous wrote that the rich are not like you and me. According to Dahl, and he seems to be every bit as accurate as Fitzgerald, the rich are all just alike. The narrator of the title story allows for no shades or exceptions; it is asserted as absolute imagery:
“All of them, all wealthy people of this type, have one peculiarity in common: they have a terrific urge to make themselves still wealthier than they already are. The million is never enough. Nor is the two million. Always, they have this insatiable longing to get more money. And that is because they live in constant terror of waking up one morning and finding there is nothing in the bank.”
The Turtle
A turtle plays a significant role in the opening story in the collection, “The Boy Who Talked with Animals.” Imagery is essential to this story because the specific and particular situation in which the turtle plays its part must be conveyed in order to fully tap into the emotional range of the narrative:
“It was a giant, a mammoth. I had not thought it possible for a turtle to be as enormous as this. How I can I describe its size? Had it been the right way up, I think a tall man could have sat on its back without his feet touching the ground. It was perhaps five feet long and four feet across, with a home domed shell of great beauty…Upside down it lay, this magnificent creature, with its four thick flippers, waving frantically in the air, and its long wrinkled neck stretching far out of its shell. The flippers had large sharp claws on them.”
The Eureka Moment
“The Maidenhall Treasure” is a narrative recounting of the complicated and semi-tragic true story of the discovery of the greatest treasure of ancient Roman artifacts on British soil yet made. It is not a story of archaeologists, but of two ploughmen hired by a farmer. There is a eureka moment in which one of the workers makes the discovery and intuitively recognizes it as potentially history-making. It is not your typical eureka moment imagery, however:
“He did not know what impulse caused him to stop digging and walk away. He will tell you that the only thing he can remember about those first few seconds the whiff of danger that came to him from the little patch of greenish blue. The moment he touched it with his fingers, something electric went through his body, and there came to him a powerful premonition that this was a thing that could destroy the peace and happiness of many people.”
The Fingersmith
The driver who picks up the title character in “The Hitchhiker” gets pulled over by a cop after he airs out the new BMW in excess of 120mph. The aggressive cop has threatened him with losing his car and the hitchhiker with an extensive background check before finally letting them go. Still anxious and reeling from the encounter, he watches from the corner of as the hitchhiker takes:
“from his pocket a tin of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers and started to roll a cigarette…The cigarette was rolled and ready in about five second. He ran his tongue along the edgef o the paper, stuck it down and popped the cigarette between his lips. Then, as if from nowhere, a lighter appeared in his hand. The lighter flamed. The cigarette was lit. The lighter disappeared. It was an altogether remarkable performance.”
It is only at this point—well more than halfway into the tale—that the narrator learns the truth about this companion and the imagery serves to underscore how the revelation that the man he randomly picked up hitching a ride is an expert fingersmith—pickpocket is too vulgar a term. The BMW will be miles away before the cop realizes his book containing all the information he wrote down about the traffic stop is missing.
