Roald Dahl lived a life that could take up a whole bookshelf of memoirs. When he was an toddler, his sister and father died within a few weeks of each other. In WW2, he was a spy assigned to persuade influential Americans to join the Allied fight, who operated alongside Ian Fleming and Noël Coward. As a nascent screenwriter, he worked with both Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. He spent thirty years married to Patricia Neal, one of the best actresses of her generation. She later admitted to never loving him.
When his son suffered a severe brain injury after being struck by a taxicab, Dahl helped invent a drainage tube that saved him and countless others. Most famously of all, he dreamed up the novels that defined the childhoods of multiple generations: Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG.
And of course, he was an unrepentant antisemite.
In The Secret World of Roald Dahl, Aaron Tracy digs into Dahl’s absurdly eventful life to ask what we are meant to do with a legacy as deeply complicated and messy as his.
The first six episodes of the ten-part show are chiefly concerned with Dahl’s unbelievable biography. Though there is a little hopping back and forward in time (our entry point is Dahl’s spy service in WW2), the broad trajectory is forward, moving through Dahl’s WW2 experiences; to his early efforts in Hollywood; to his complex and dramatic relationship with Patricia Neal; to the eventual mid-life career pivot that would make him legendary. It’s hard to express just how full these instalments are. If someone had written Dahl’s life as a novel, the editor would surely suggest the author cutting out parts, because the sheer wealth of drama sometimes borders on farcical.
Because there is so much to Dahl’s story, some of Tracy’s self-insertions can be frustrating. The odd comment would have been fine, but his bar for personal intrusion is pretty low. Talking about how Dahl’s success as a seducer spy was made easier by the wartime shortage of eligible men in New York City, Tracy riffs, “Although my wife would say, there’s always a shortage of eligible men in this city, which I think is an insult to me?” In a sparser podcast, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But with such a lot of material here, those trivialities just feel like a distracting waste of time.
Some of his assertions are a little broad, too. When he uses the fact that Dahl created Matilda and Sophie from The BFG (two small girls) as proof that he understood women, there’s no self-awareness that one man is making this comment about another man. It isn’t a great look.
Still, for the most part Tracy is a warm host and a good storyteller, who does a largely excellent job at pulling the different strands of Dahl’s life and personality into something bigger. While his more trivial personal comments are unnecessary, Tracy finds a fascinating early framing for the show: as a Jewish man making a podcast about a notorious antisemite. The dilemma is framed starkly in his description of how conflicted his friend, writer Ben Dolnick, feels to hear his daughter has fallen in love with Dahl’s work, when Dahl “may have been repelled by her very existence.”
In the seventh and eighth episodes, Tracy steps away from Dahl’s biography and dives into those heinous comments he made about Jewish people, talking to journalists like Roxane Gay and Claire Dederer, who come at the question of whether it’s possible to separate the art from the artist from decidedly different angles. These conversations are smart and probing, largely eschewing binary thinking, often provoking more questions than answers.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl is discursive rather than prescriptive. Though Tracy is open about how he still feels able to read the books, he and the people he talks to aren’t interested in telling you what to think, but suggesting what it might be worth thinking about. It’s a considered, well-judged approach, that pays dividends for the respect it shows to the audience’s intelligence.
And ultimately, whether or not you think it’s possible to separate the art from the artist, The Secret World of Roald Dahl still offers a riveting, thorny history of one of the most influential children’s book writers of all time.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd.