The Witches (novel)

The Witches

First edition cover
Author	Roald Dahl
Illustrator	Quentin Blake
Country	United Kingdom
Genre	Children's fantasy
Publisher	Jonathan Cape
Publication date	1983
Media type	Print
Pages	208
Awards	Whitbread Book Award (1983)
ISBN	978-0-14-132264-3
OCLC	144596054

The Witches is a children's fantasy novel by the British writer Roald Dahl. The story is set partly in Norway and partly in the United Kingdom, and features the experiences of a young British boy and his Norwegian grandmother in a world where child-hating societies of witches secretly exist in every country. The witches are all ruled by the extremely vicious and powerful Grand High Witch, who in the story has just arrived in England to organise her worst plot ever. But an elderly former witch hunter and her young grandson find out about the evil plan and now they must do everything to stop it and defeat the witches.

The Witches was originally published in 1983 by Jonathan Cape in London, with illustrations by Quentin Blake (like many of Dahl's works). The book was adapted into an unabridged audio reading by Lynn Redgrave ( ISBN 0-060-53616-0), a stage play and a two-part radio dramatisation for the BBC, a 1990 movie directed by Nicolas Roeg which starred Anjelica Huston and Rowan Atkinson, and an opera by Marcus Paus and Ole Paus.

Plot

An seven-year-old British boy goes to live with his Norwegian grandmother after his parents are killed in a car accident. The grandmother is a wonderful storyteller. The boy loves all the stories, but he is especially enthralled by the one about witches, which she says are horrific creatures who seek to kill human children. She tells the boy that she knew of five children when she was younger, who were cursed by witches. One of them was a girl who was led away by a strange lady and was never seen again. Another girl suddenly started to grow feathers all over her body and within a month had turned into a large white chicken. A third disappeared and was soon discovered trapped in an oil painting in her own home, her appearance changing over the next 54 years as she aged and finally disappeared from the canvas. One boy turned into stone several hours after his skin started to turn into a greyish-yellow. A second boy turned into a talking porpoise while he was holidaying on the Norwegian coast with his family.

She tells him how to recognize them, and tells him that a witch is always certain to wearing gloves when you meet her, as they have claws instead of finger nails. Witches are also bald, which they disguise by wearing a wig. They also have distinctive nostrils, which can smell out a child across the street on a pitch black night - with a cleaner child giving out the worst possible smell. She also tells about "witchophiles", who hunt witches, which she is retired from, telling of an encounter with a witch which cost the grandmother her left thumb and which is so horrible she cannot bear to speak of it - although unlike the other children she did not disappear or transform into another species. While witches can look and act like normal women, they are actually monstrous "demons in human shape".

As specified in the parents' will, the boy and his grandmother soon have to return to England, where he was born and was in school, and where the house he is inheriting is located. The grandmother warns the boy to be on his guard, however, since English witches are known to be among the most vicious in the world, although. They are particularly notorious for turning children into loathsome creatures so that unsuspecting adults kill them. As the boy asks more questions, the grandmother reveals that witches in different countries have different customs; and that while the witches in each country have close affiliations with one another, they are not allowed to communicate with witches from other countries. She also tells him about the mysterious Grand High Witch, the feared and diabolical leader of all of the world's witches, who each year visits their councils in every country.

Shortly after arriving back in England, while the boy is working on the roof of the tree-house he has been building, he sees a strange woman in black staring up at him with an eerie smile, and he quickly registers that she is a witch - particularly as she is wearing gloves. When the witch offers him a snake to tempt him, he climbs further up the tree and stays there, not daring to come down until his grandmother comes looking for him. This persuades the boy and his grandmother to be especially wary; and he carefully scrutinizes all women to determine whether or not they might be witches.

When the grandmother becomes ill with pneumonia, the doctor orders her to cancel a planned holiday in Norway. Instead, they go to a luxury hotel in Bournemouth on England's south coast, where the boy gets into trouble with the manager after his new pet mice scare one of the chambermaids. Under threat of having the poor creatures drowned in a bucket if they are found out of their cage, the boy goes to train his pet mice in the hotel ballroom when the apparent members of the "Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" show up for their annual meeting. The boy quickly realizes that this is really the yearly gathering of England's witches (and this society is just a front) when one of them reaches underneath her hair to scratch at her scalp with a gloved hand, followed by many others, but is trapped in the room before he can escape.

A young woman goes on stage and removes her entire face, which is really a mask, and turns around to reveal a truly hideous visage revealing herself to be the Grand High Witch herself. She immediately reveals her displeasure at the English witches failure to eliminate enough children and demands that they exterminate the lot of them before the next meeting. When one witch dares to protest the sheer impossibility of such a task, the Grand High Witch responds by using fiery sparks from her eyes to burn her alive. The Grand High Witch unveils her master plan: all of England's witches are to purchase sweet shops (with "homemade" money printed from her money-making machine) and give away free sweets and chocolates for the grand opening laced with her latest creation, "Formula 86 delayed-action mouse-maker", a magic potion meant to turn the drinker into a mouse at a specific time with a single drop. The intent is that the children's teachers can kill the transformed children, hopefully resulting in the total extinction of the local child population.

To demonstrate, the Grand High Witch turns a gluttonous child named Bruno Jenkins (who is lured to the convention hall by the promise of free chocolate) into a mouse. Shortly after, the witches smell the narrator's presence and corner him. The Grand High Witch then pours an entire bottle of Formula 86 down the narrator's throat, instantly turning him into a mouse. The transformed child retains his sentience, personality and even his voice. After tracking down Bruno, the transformed boy returns to his grandmother's hotel room and tells her what he has learned. He suggests turning the tables on the witches by slipping the potion into their food. With some difficulty, he manages to get his hands on a bottle of the potion from the Grand High Witch's room.

After an attempt to return Bruno to his parents fails spectacularly, mainly due to Mrs. Jenkins's fear of mice, the grandmother takes Bruno and the narrator to the dining hall, then he sneaks towards the kitchen, holding the potion. He spies the witches coming in to dinner on his way and finally enters the kitchen successfully, where he pours the potion into the green pea soup intended for the witches' dinner. On the way back from the kitchen, a cook spots the narrator and chops off part of his tail with a carving knife, before he manages to escape back to his grandmother. The witches all turn into mice within a few minutes, having had massive overdoses. The hotel staff and the guests all panic and, unknowingly, the staff end up killing the Grand High Witch and all of England's witches.

Having returned home, the boy and his grandmother then devise a plan to get rid of the world of witches. Learning the location of the Grand High Witch's Norwegian castle, they will travel there and use the potion to change her successor and assistants into mice, then release cats to destroy them before they can escape and create havoc in their new form. Using the Grand High Witch's money-making machine and information on all the other witches in various countries, they will then try to track down and eradicate them all over the world, once and for all. The grandmother also reveals that, as a mouse, the boy will probably only live about another nine years, but the boy does not mind as he does not want to live any longer than his grandmother, so that in the end they can both die together as he would hate to have anyone else look after him.

Reception

Dahl's children's stories have been praised as often as challenged. For instance, three of Dahl's stories appear in Publishers Weekly's 150 Bestselling Children's Books of all time (until the year 2000).^[1] In 2012, The Witches was ranked number 81 among all-time children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a monthly with primarily U.S. audience. It was the third of four books by Dahl among the Top 100, more than any other writer.^[2]

However, The Witches was banned by some libraries due to perceived misogyny.^[3] It appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990 to 1999, at number 22.^[4] Some critics consider the book sexist,^[5] with one stating that the book is how boys learn to become men who hate women.^[6] Others see the book as presenting a more balanced message about learning to see past surface inspirations. One critic considers it an "unlikely source of inspiration for feminists."^[7]

Adaptations

References

External links

• Official website