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Don’t get me wrong, I believe that when it comes to fantasy, Nordic writer Hans Christian Andersen and the Bavarian Brothers Grimm set a standard not yet matched. As for the nineteenth-century realism of the Russians and that of Prague’s most famous son it can still send shivers down the strongest spine. No, what I refer to is the Granta-patented English short story – a curt, polite tale with an astute twist at the end – that was protected by two of the twentieth-century greats: Alan Coren and Roald Dahl.
Alan Coren, son of a plumber and a hairdresser, always kept his common roots as his go-to in a career which spanned over 40 years. Before he became editor of Punch and set the standard for periodical journal humour, Alan Coren had won a scholarship to Oxford and had been to Yale to study American Literature. Once he got down to the writing though he was prolific; his calculations showed that his oeuvre quadrupled that of Marcel Proust without ever losing its spark. The best stories are the Queen parodies such as One is One and All Alone in which Dear Lizzie is left at a –loose end- after the cancellation of a Canadian visit, and She entertains herself by singing God Save One.
In his earlier stories he deals with racism brilliantly in Through the Glass, Darkly in which a white man tries to rent a room in idyllic Harlem, South Bronx. After umpteen cancellations a friendly landlord puts him straight, once one white person moves in they all want in. In other stories Alan Coren parodies Ernest Hemingway and deals with early English tax policy between Glutinus Sinus and Mr Cooper-Miller. In Chocolates and Cuckoos Clocks Alan Coren is presented as the strongest, sharpest and most fascinating storyteller of his generation.
Arguably, a generation earlier Roald Dahl was fascinating English audiences with his own, quirkily idiosyncratic children’s stories. The gentle giant of writing was churning out such titles as Matilda or Danny, the Champion of the World, but alongside these titles there were the myriad of short stories. The Henry Sugars and the Fingersmiths inhabited a world of their own, straight out of a place very different from all the brilliant children’s stories; there is the eerie, motel visitor who stays in during the day and disappears at night. Then of course there are the raunchier tales of Dahl’s later years when he remarried but we don’t talk about that.
What Roald Dahl did excellently was to create characters so unreadable and so fascinating that the reader feels obliged to stick around just to see the end, like a game of poker where you want to wait until the end to see how the cards turn over. Roald Dahl promises so much and then proceeds to deliver even more; from gothic butlers to English cads, Roald Dahl created his own brilliant microcosms and proceeded to deliver them year after year.
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