Paul Haspel's Reviews > Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Charlie Bucket is a really good kid – thoughtful, other-centered, concerned for the welfare of his family, dealing uncomplainingly with tough times – and therefore he is eminently well-suited to serve as a sympathetic protagonist for Roald Dahl’s 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This classic of children’s fantasy, for all the beauty of its more lyrical passages and its flights of fancy, draws much of its depth and resonance from its gritty, tough-minded qualities. Like the Brothers Grimm in Germany centuries before, Dahl knew that children wanted to be told the truth, and didn’t want their stories sanitized and “safe.” No sugar-coating, please - not even in a story about a chocolate factory.

Dahl was born in Wales and spent most of his life in England; he flew fighter planes for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War (an experience that no doubt nourished the writing of his memorable short story “Beware of the Dog”). After the war, he began his writing career, alternating between books aimed at children and books directed toward a more general audience. His works of children’s literature, particularly those with strong fantasy elements, seem to have had the most impact, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is perhaps the best known of all his novels.

As Charlie and the Chocolate Factory begins, Charlie and his family – his mother and father and his four grandparents, all of whom live together under one roof – are facing dire circumstances. Mr. Bucket’s humdrum factory job is not enough to provide for the family; the Buckets are constantly hungry, and their ramshackle house can’t even keep out the winter cold. Their situation, in short – while exaggerated and stylized – is not too much unlike what might have faced quite a few British households in those days of the 1960’s, when changes in the British economy left some families behind, particularly in the country’s older industrial cities.

Charlie’s hunger is exacerbated by the fact that the Buckets’ hometown is also home to a vast chocolate factory owned by the mysterious Willy Wonka. The factory, long closed to the people who used to work there, is still somehow producing chocolate; and soon the world is shocked by the news that Willy Wonka will open his factory to the five lucky children who happen to buy a Wonka candy bar that contains a Golden Ticket!

Naturally, Charlie – like every other child on Earth who hears this news – hopes to find a Golden Ticket; and even though the Buckets can’t afford it, they pool their meager resources and buy Charlie a Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight. “The room became silent. Everybody was waiting now for Charlie to open his present” (p. 27). Will Charlie eventually find a Golden Ticket that will gain him admission to Willy Wonka’s mysterious candy factory? No spoiler alert needed here, I think. It’s rather like asking whether a glass slipper will be important in the life of Cinderella.

Charlie’s Grandpa Joe, a steadfast companion in spite of his age and physical infirmities, immediately volunteers to accompany Charlie on the visit to the chocolate factory; and on the appointed day, at the appointed time, they meet the other four lucky winners and their parents – and an unfortunate lot they are. There is Augustus Gloop, a compulsive overeater; Violet Beauregarde, a comparably compulsive gum-chewer; Mike Teavee, an inveterate viewer of vapid and violent television programs; and Veruca Salt, a thoroughly spoiled girl who is always demanding more and more from her wealthy and indulgent parents. The reader senses at once that these four perfectly despicable children will serve as foils for the sympathetic and likeable Charlie.

Presenting their Golden Tickets, and gaining admission to the chocolate factory, the five children finally get to meet Mr. Willy Wonka. And as this character has become so important in world popular culture, it seems a good time to share Dahl’s description of Willy Wonka, with his black top hat, plum-coloured tailcoat, pearl-grey gloves, and gold-topped walking cane:

Covering his chin, there was a small neat pointed black beard – a goatee. And his eyes – his eyes were most marvelously bright. They seemed to be sparkling and twinkling at you the whole time. The whole face, in fact, was alight with fun and laughter.

And oh, how clever he looked! How quick and sharp and full of life! He kept making quick jerky little movements with his head, cocking it this way and that, and taking everything in with those bright twinkling eyes. He was like a squirrel in the quickness of his movements, like a quick clever old squirrel from the park. (pp. 57-58)

At once old and young, wise and seemingly naïve, Willy Wonka is a complex liminal figure of the kind that so often appear in fairy tales – and therefore he is the perfect guide to take the children, and us, into the world that he has created.

Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, in accordance with the conventions of children’s fantasy literature, is a magical place. It is not a real-world chocolate factory like the one that once offered tours in Hershey, Pennsylvania; rather, it is a vast underground complex, where one travels by boat down a river of chocolate, from the Chocolate Room to the Inventing Room to the Nut Room to the Television-Chocolate Room – or can travel even faster, in all directions, via a Great Glass Elevator!

And in the process of these peregrinations, the disagreeable children mentioned above eventually face the consequences of their bad behaviour – always because of choices that they make while in the chocolate factory. When one child falls into the chocolate river and gets pushed up a chocolate pipe, Willy Wonka blithely assures the child’s mother, “Keep calm, my dear lady, keep calm. There is no danger! No danger whatsoever!...A most interesting little journey. But he’ll come out of it just fine, you wait and see” (p. 75). His cheerfulness during these passages from the novel is at once endearing and disturbing.

And Willy Wonka’s employees, the Oompa-Loompas – “tiny men…no larger than medium-sized dolls” (p. 68), rescued by Willy Wonka from starvation in their home of Loompaland and brought to work at the factory – serve as a sort of chorus; each time a child undergoes some sort of reversal as a result of their greed or selfishness, the Oompa-Loompas are there to sing a song about the vice that has undone the child, as when they sing about the habit of gum-chewing:

“Dear friends, we surely all agree
There’s almost nothing worse to see
Than some repulsive little bum
Who’s always chewing chewing gum….
So please believe us when we say
That chewing gum will never pay;
This sticky habit’s bound to send
The chewer to a sticky end.” (pp. 99-100)

Charlie Bucket, of course, is smarter than the other children, and more perceptive; in the Television-Chocolate Room, he watches a group of Oompa-Loompas working silently in space suits around a matter-transference device, and experiences "a queer sense of danger. There was something dangerous about this whole business, and the Oompa-Loompas knew it" (p. 125). It should be no surprise, therefore, that – in accordance with the conventions of classical comedy – the resolution of the story, for Charlie, is much happier than it is for his disagreeable traveling companions.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been filmed twice – once in 1971, as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka; and once in 2005, under the novel’s original title, with Johnny Depp in the Wonka role. The latter film has the big-name director (Tim Burton) and the big-budget special effects; but the older film, to my mind, captures better the spirit of the novel, with Gene Wilder expressing the offbeat qualities of the Wonka character in a powerful and nuanced manner. Next time you view the 1971 film, watch for the moments when naughty children are about to do something that will put them in trouble, while Wilder’s Wonka says, “Oh, no, please, don’t,” in a thoroughly bored monotone. He knows good kids from bad ones; he’s seen all this before.

And I like coming back to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory around Grandparents Day, because of the character of Grandpa Joe. Memorable grandparent characters are relatively rare in literature; but Grandpa Joe, Charlie’s loyal companion and wise counselor, embodies what a good grandparent should be, and may remind many readers of their own favourite grandparent. The book’s narrator tells us that the 96½-year-old Grandpa Joe “was delicate and weak” and spoke very little during the day, but then adds that “in the evenings, when Charlie, his beloved grandson, was in the room, he seemed in some marvelous way to grow quite young again. All his tiredness fell away from him, and he became as eager and excited as a young boy” (pp. 9-10). Any grandparent, I think, can relate to the way Dahl conveys how seeing one’s grandchildren can make one feel young again.

Grandpa Joe gives his last 10-cent piece to Charlie, in order to give Charlie one more chance at finding the Golden Ticket. He insists on going into the chocolate factory with Charlie, and helps Charlie through the often hair-raising adventures that occur there. He is, in short, the kind of grandparent that every child deserves; and now that I am a grandparent myself, he is the kind of grandparent that I try to be.

It may seem strange that the novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory can be creepy and uplifting at once; but then again, it seems strange that chocolate and peanut butter taste so good together.