I find I read biographies with the same bad habit that afflicts my daily life--a readiness to judge a person in the whole based on an instance of behaviour or speech. It's an entrenched habit that only grace will erode (but that's another story).
In the case of Donald Sturrock's "Storyteller: The life of Roald Dahl" that bad habit could lead to neurological trauma. Let me explain…
If it's a biography's job to distil the essence of man, his life, almost as an argument made, then this book fails. Because when I turned the final page, what it left me was not a thesis but a coin. Flip it once, it lands with a smiling Dahl--philanthropist, children's advocate, gifted storyteller; flip it again, it lands with a frowning Dahl--bully, provocateur, gifted "storyteller"… page after page, paragraph after paragraph, filled with contradictions.
Clearly my definition of biography is broken, because it's a great biography.
Dahl's life was full. You could remove his writing entirely, and still have a job selecting material. Hijinks at Repton (a school that could have been model for Tom Brown's School Days); fighter pilot--crash landed in North Africa before his first mission, recuperated in time to take part in World War Two's debacle at Greece, and finally invalided home with a twisted spine that would inflict him for life; socialite who mixed with presidents, movie makers, magnates, writers, spies; grieving family man who, in rapid succession, endured the death of his first daughter, and disablement of his son then wife.
In the end, it left me profoundly sad. Biographies often do that to me, with their rapid sweep through a person's life. Toddler photos in particular get me--the eyes that look at you without an inkling of what joys and griefs the next three hundred pages will record. The mixture of brokenness and joy of this complex man, and the sense that beneath an exterior often so sure, there lurked the confused and hurting child. I don't think he was alone in that.
With grim irony Sturrock records that Dahl's second last utterance was to tell his daughter, Tessa, that he loved her very much, thus healing a longtime rift.
His very last, in response to a needle prick, was an expletive.
