Any story with a surprise ending uses misdirection to lead the reader towards one conclusion, then throws another at them. This switch is annoying if it’s not done well.
I’ve written a bit about what poor twists look like, and what good ones look like. Good twists work because that surprise conclusion is a natural one that shows a deeper understanding of the characters than the reader cottoned on to. The ‘red herring’ conclusion must be natural, the twist conclusion must be natural and smart.
Just goes to show, good stories are rarely written in a night.
I left an important part out of my post on The Last Act. The ‘red herring’ conclusion to this story is that Mrs. Cooper finds fulfillment at work, peace through Dr. Jacobs’ treatment and another love with Conrad. That’s not what happens. How did Dahl get me to assume the ‘red herring’ ending would happen?
When you read The Last Act twice, you’ll see that Dahl drops hints about what’s really to come (I’ve written about that before too). These hints are the loci of Dahl’s most clever misdirections: the reader is encouraged to interpret these hints in expectation of the ‘red herring’ ending, when in fact, the hints signal something else. When the twist comes, I’m left thinking: “Oh, yeah, because… she knew sex wasn’t the answer.”
Dahl’s favorite tool for misdirection is this: he uses interesting bits of knowledge delivered through the conversation of the lead characters. He employs this tool very simply in The Last Act. Conrad talks to Anna about the dangers of gin, menthol and saltpeter– all things Anna consumes through martinis and cigarettes. Not good for your lady-parts, Anna!
These little lectures COULD BE interpreted as loving concern. But they are really booby-traps. Juniper oil, menthol and saltpeter are anti-aphrodesiacs; things that will lessen sexual experience. Conrad plants these little mines in Anna’s head, and when they come to the act, wow, is she lacking.
I was expecting that their union would be something loving; that Anna would find somebody to live for and to look after her again– maybe with the bonus of less ‘dependency’ in the relationship. Nope!
Reading Conrad’s little lectures on menthol, saltpeter and gin was enlightening for me. Dahl has an astounding breadth of interests and knows what a layman will find intriguing. Dahl had a passion for medicine. He also liked gardening and bees, which brings me on to the next story.
Royal Jelly is about a father, Albert Taylor, who saves his starving baby daughter– a daughter which took him nine years to conceive– by putting royal jelly in her formula. Nice story, right?
Superficially, Royal Jelly seems to misdirect in a heavy-handed way. There’s not much secret about what magic substance will save the little spud. The red-herring conclusion is this: the Baby Girl will be saved by royal jelly, but there will be some road-block along the way.
The salvation does happen, but it’s an uncomfortable salvation. The results of the treatment are not very clever, IMHO, but they are definitely unexpected, and are reasonably natural, given the fact that papa is described as bee-like half way through the story. The cleverness is in how Dahl misdirects with the suggestion of ‘road-blocks’.
Dahl’s art– and the reason that his misdirection is not heavy-handed– comes from the ‘road-blocks’ and where they lead your expectations. For 13 pages, Roald Dahl talks of nothing but bees, their sexual habits, the price of Royal Jelly in New York City, strange Mexican medical experiments with Royal Jelly… a laundry list of interesting tidbits that the author has read about these insects. Tidbits that suggest Royal Jelly will save the daughter by reversing her weight loss with various consequences. A few of the tidbits suggest that the jelly may make the girl super-fertile as well, but these come after the wonderful stories of weight-gain.
Dahl then drops a hint about the Taylor’s last honey-crop being poor.
As the story progresses Baby Girl does gain weight, but strangely.
“… it means in five days a baby weighing seven and a half pounds to start off with would increase in weight to five tons!”
The child’s body swells but her legs stay spindly. Her eyes don’t loose that milky, far-away look.
“Now isn’t that marvelous!” he cried, beaming. “I’ll bet she must be almost back to normal already!”
“It frightens me, Albert. It’s too quick.”
The child’s belly develops a layer of fuzz. Clearly, Albert is turning his kid into a bug. Case closed, right?
“The reason we had only half the usual crop last summer,” he said slowly, lowering his voice, “was because I turned one hundred of my hives over to the production of royal jelly.”
Albert, the living Royal Jelly experiment, the human-drone, has sired a queen. For a year, he’s been eating the jelly himself.
I didn’t expect the problem to be with Albert, I expected the problem to be a weak baby. I didn’t expect Conrad to be a monster, I expected him to be a blessing.
Half way through Royal Jelly we learn that Albert looks like a human bee, but we’re encouraged to interpret that fact as a consequence of his love of bees, not because he’s been feeding himself jelly. Half-way through The Last Act we learn about Conrad, the concerned student of women– a gynecologist, not a misogynist. For each story, ‘half-way through’ is 10 minutes after we’ve made our decision about the ending we’re expecting.
To a large extent Dahl was self-educated. He had that peculiar breadth of knowledge and wide interests that many self-educated people have. He used this wide knowledge as a tool to manage readers’ expectations in all of his writing-- even in his children’s books.
Let’s recap with examples: There are the facts of the story; the information you need to know so that you don’t feel cheated. And then there are the little tidbits like ‘saltpeter is in gunpowder and cigarettes’ or ‘Royal Jelly sells for $480/lbs in NYC’, which are actually shinning baubles designed to distract you from the pertinent information, baubles that keep you guessing what will happen. Dahl throws these baubles to the ground like Melanion dropping apples for Atlanta. That’s why he’s an entertainer.
Finally, it’s worth looking at the morals suggested by the two stories. Mrs. Anna Cooper’s self-actualization through working backfires. Dr. Jacobs’ sex advice doesn’t work. Anna’s foray into promiscuity is her undoing. Albert Taylor cheats nature and creates (two) monsters.
The Last Act (1966) was written when Roald was 50; Royal Jelly (1960) when he was 44. The morals suggested in these stories are very different to the ideas of Dahl’s mentors in the 1940s (Charles Marsh and FDR).
In these stories, are we hearing the voice of a young man stamping his foot and saying: “It’s your fault I used you!” ? Or are these stories how an aging man chose to run from his conscience? Or are they simply evidence Dahl’s changing opinions?
I can’t answer those questions, except to say that the last half of Dahl’s life was not tranquil.
