Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl

(Book Review--Children's Literature, Fantasy)

Started: August 11, 2021

Finished: August 12, 2021

My History With This Book / Why I'm Re-Reading it Now

Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this is another book that was read to me in elementary school.  (I think it was our first grade teacher, although I don't remember clearly.  But definitely one of my early teachers.)

If you've been following this blog, you know that I've been re-reading through these childhood classics with my wife.  First Charlotte's Web, then Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and now this.  (My wife is reading these for this first time since English is her second language.  And I'm taking the opportunity to revisit books from my childhood that I only vaguely remember, and am overdue for a re-read of.)

So, my wife read this book first.  She loved the first part of the book, and was constantly telling me how funny various scenes from the book were.  She didn't like the second half of the book nearly as much.  "That part about the pills," she said, "the pills that make you 20 years older or 20 years younger--it's the kind of thing that I can imagine would be really interesting to the mind of a kid, but as an adult, I thought it was a bit tiresome."

When she first told me this, I actually had no idea what she was talking about.  And I had to admit to my wife that I didn't remember any part about pills at all.

In fact, when I thought about it, I could only remember one scene in the book--I remembered the part when they were re-entering the earth's atmosphere, and the aliens were burning up.  That one scene has managed to stick in my mind some 35 years later.  But the rest of the book?  It was a complete blank.  

I attributed this lack of memory to the fact that Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator was never made into a movie.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been made into a movie a couple of times, and so those movies have helped to keep the story fresh in my mind over the years.  But no such luck with Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.  I had it read to me once in elementary school, I hadn't touched it since then, and as a result, the only thing I could remember was the one scene about the aliens burning up.

Well, obviously I was overdue for a re-read.  So when my wife finished it off, I took it next.  And here I am with the review.

The Review

Just like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, this is a very quick and easy read.  It's only 182 pages long, very painless to get through, and I finished it off in just over a day.

It is, however, not nearly as good.  I finished it off easily enough, but I wasn't glued to it like I was for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Nor did I find it as funny as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

It's not that Roald Dahl isn't trying.  The book is crammed full of all the usual Roald Dahl jokes and strange creatures.  So why isn't this book as good?  Well, that's the question I asked myself as I read it.  Why am I not enjoying this book as much as its predecessor?

Part of the problem is no doubt too high expectations.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a classic.  It's a "lightening in a bottle" book that could probably never be replicated with the same success.

But other than that, I think the other problem with this book is that its too unfocused.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was an extremely silly book, but I realize now it actually had a very tight plot. 

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, by contrast, has a plot that's all over the place.  And nothing really makes any sense.  And I think that affected the humor.

It's strange to say.  Why would the plot affect how funny or unfunny the individual gags are?  Well, I've been thinking about this as I read the book, and I think I've realized that humor is based on context.  Humor is a subversion of our logical expectations of the world.   Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as silly as it was, was still built around an expectation that the world should be logical.  That's why the parents on the tour got so frustrated with Willy Wonka and his antics during the tour.  And that tension between the logical expectations and the ridiculousness is where the book gets its humor.

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator has all the same puns and jokes as its predecessor, but it's clearly based in a world in which everything and everyone is ridiculous.

That, plus nothing in the book makes any sense.  And again, this is in contrast to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which could be very silly, but the plot elements of the book were explained, and they made sense by the logic of the book.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory also had a better sense of set-up and pay-off for the jokes than Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator.

I think that's it.  I'm talking here in terms of degrees, not absolutes.  (There was some element of the pure randomness and ridiculousness in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but not as much.)  And I'm also struggling here to find a theoretical explanation which I can retrofit onto an emotional reaction.  But I think that's the reason I didn't like it as much.

In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, the characters will do a lot of things that make no sense.  Then, one of the characters will call attention to the fact that it makes no sense.  And then Roald Dahl will attempt to derive humor out of the fact that it's all ridiculous and doesn't make any sense.  

There are a few examples of this in the book, but I think the best example is the appearance of the space aliens the Knids.  They appear in the elevators of the space hotel, and then very slowly stretch their bodies out to form the word "SCRAM".  Willy Wonka, upon seeing the word "SCRAM" panics, and tells everyone to run out of  the space hotel and back into the Great Glass Elevator.

“But if they’re so fierce and dangerous,” Charlie said, “why didn’t they eat us up right away in the Space Hotel? Why did they waste time twisting their bodies into letters and writing SCRAM?”

“Because they’re show–offs,” Mr. Wonka replied. “They’re tremendously proud of being able to write like that.”

“But why say scram when they wanted to catch us and eat us?”

“It’s the only word they know,” Mr. Wonka said.

Roald Dahl is obviously winking at the fact that none of this makes any sense, and  none of this is supposed to make sense.  (The other question is why did Willy Wonka wait for the Knids to finish spelling the word when he already knew beforehand how dangerous they were.  I got the impression that that Roald Dahl just wanted a scene in which the aliens wrote "scram", and then only later realized that it didn't make sense, so he tried to laugh it off.)  

But when the whole book is written like this (and, yes, the whole book is written like this) then it's hard to really get invested in the story.  And consequently the humor loses its ability to shock or surprise us, and thus the humor loses its punch.

There are also several poems written into the story as well.  (Within the context of the story, they're supposed to be songs that the characters sing, but for us readers they only appear as written words on the page.)  Roald Dahl is obviously a gifted wordsmith who loves creating silly - rhyming - story - poems, but they don't always integrate into the story very well.  In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas were always the ones singing songs, and the in-universe explanation for this is that the Oompa-Loompas just loved making songs up about whatever was going on, and you couldn't stop them from bursting out into song.

In Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, however, the first half of the book takes place up in space, away from the Oompa-Loompas.  So Willy Wonka bursts into a song about a Knid instead, a song which doesn't entirely fit with the action taking place in the main story.  (There's also another song done by the President's nanny.  And then when we get back down to Earth the Oompa-Loompa's give us more songs, but songs which are not always as connected to the main story as they were in the previous books.)

The first 100 pages of the book are adventures out in outer-space.  The last 80 pages of the book are about the aging and anti-aging books.  This was the part that (as I wrote above) my wife complained was less interesting.  And after reading it, I have to agree with my wife.

The basic concept of a pill that can make you 20 years younger, or another pill that can make you older again, is decent enough.  I mean, it's something that's definitely been done before in fiction, but it can be done again.  But the problem is that this part just goes on and on and one for a full 80 pages--almost half of the book is about these pills.  And de-aging pills are not 80 pages worth of interesting.  If it had been only 20 pages of the story, it would have been fine.  But as it is, it just goes on for way too long.

So, yeah, in summary--not nearly as good as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  But, here I am, harping exclusively on the negatives.  This book isn't all bad.  It still has its moments.  Sure, the book is ridiculous, but there's some wonderful ridiculousness, some great bizarreness, some great scenes with the space aliens and the space hotel and the astronauts.  It wasn't as funny as its predecessor, but its still good fun

Other Odds and Ends

The President

In the first part of this book, the President of the United States and his supporting cabinet are a big part of the plot.  Given that this book was published in 1972, I was expecting a Nixon parody.  (Or possibly a Johnson parody--art usually lags a few years behind reality.)  However, neither of these presidents fit the parody.
The illustrations in my edition reminded me of the president from Dr. Strangelove.

...and I suspect the similarity is intentional.  Now, granted my edition is using the illustrations by Quentin Blake (W), who, according to Wikipedia, didn't come in until the 3rd edition.  (The first edition and the second edition both had separate illustrators).  But still.  There are some rather Strangelove-esque scenes with the President's cabinet.  For example there's an Army Chief of Staff who is over-eager to blow things up, and there's also a scene with him on the phone trying to contact The Premier of Soviet Russia and the President of China.  But more than the one-to-one parallels with Strangelove, there's just a general sense of bizarreness in the President's cabinet that's very Strangelove-esque. 

Um, actually, speaking of the scene in which the President of the U.S.A. tries to call the President of China, this section contains some puns on Chinese names and a parody of the Chinese accent that probably couldn't be written nowadays.  (I personally think it's harmless, but in this day and age of sensitivity, I wouldn't be surprised if within a few years it was edited out of re-printings.)

Other Scenes

And speaking of editing stuff out... There are a couple passages in this book that I'm wondering if my first grade teacher actually read to us, or maybe they got quietly edited out of her reading.  There's a song the Oompa-Loompas sing about a girl who eats too many laxatives, and gets explosive diarrhea, which I don't remember from childhood at all, and I suspect my teacher might have skipped over.  

Also, when Charlie and Willy Wonka go to Minusland, it's described as being like hell.  Since I went to a religious school, I suspect this description as well might have gotten skipped over.

Publishing Dates

The end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory end with Charlie and his family getting into the Glass Elevator with Willy Wonka and everyone then flying off together.  It seems to lead perfectly into The Great Glass  Elevator.  But, when checking Wikipedia, I was surprised to learn that this book wasn't published until 1972--8 years later.  It appears that this sequel wasn't actually planned out from the beginning.  (Which probably explains a lot, actually.)

The Great Glass  Elevator also ends on a note which seems designed to lead right into another adventure at the White House.  According to Wikipedia, Roald Dahl wrote the first chapter of that 3rd adventure Charlie in the White House, but never finished it.

Links

I  stumbled upon this link while searching Google Images: Charlie and the Not-so-great Glass Elevator: Ronald Dahl’s follow-up to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory might just be my children’s first experience of what a disappointing sequel looks like.  

I'm largely in agreement with what the author wrote.

Weekly Reading Vlog:

August 15, 2021

Video Review (Playlist HERE)

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl: Book Review