George’s Marvellous Medicine by Roald Dahl

Roald Dahl some of the most famous, iconic and (possibly the reason for this) the most cinematically adapted children’s novels of the 20th century.

These include Matilda, about a child with abusive parents and abusive teachers who is very intelligent and has telekenetic abilities… One is James and the Giant Peach, about a young boy with dead parents and abusive guardians, who has an adventure with a giant peach and makes friends with many insects. The Witches also includes an orphaned child at risk of exploitation, so it is fair to say that unsatisfactory familial situations are recurring motifs in the texts of this Welshman. (Was Roald Dahl Welsh? There’s loads of stuff named after him in Cardiff, so I always presumed yes, but it’s not something I’ve ever looked up…)

George’s Marvellous Medicine is a novel I’m not 100% certain I read as a child, which is the main reason why I picked this copy up when I saw it for sale at a low low price in a budget supermarket a few months ago.

I read many of Dahl’s books as a child, and have re-read at least one – Fantastic Mr Fox – as an adult, but at no point during this one did I feel the click of recognition that comes from re-arriving at a narrative one has encountered before (e.g. the experience I had half a decade or so ago when accidentally re-read some Tolstoy)… It was unfamiliar…

I was expecting something about poachers and poaching, which – a look over the garishly-presented covers of other Dahl texts that illustrates the interior back cover of this edition – I realise now was Danny, Champion of the World. Poaching was also a key point in Fantastic Mr Fox. Poaching and terrible parents/guardians… The motifs of English children’s fiction (also, I believe, they all historically had a lot of racism in but this was gradually edited out at various points to keep Dahl’s books marketable in subsequent editions.)

This one, tho, flips the focus not from the people removing animals without permission from enclosed land, but it is instead about farmers themselves and the terrible terrible terrible things they do as part of the industrialised meat industry…

George is left at home alone with his grumpy and a bit mean grandmother (tho she seems more irritating than abusive in this one, and – especially given the contexts of much stricter parental behaviours at the time Dahl was writing and normalised violence as control and punishment – not necessarily as bad as other Dahl “villains”  (then again, think of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – were any of those children deserving of violent (though somehow pain free?) disfigurement???)), but there may well have been more serious transgressions perpetuated by the grandmother in the original text that have been lost to modernising editors.

Maybe not, though. Either way, it is George here who is the aggressor. It is George who is the person who plans and executes an act of violent (and, again, somehow pain free) disfigurement against other people.

George, the son of a farmer, decides to make a “marvellous medicine” that will “liven up” (that might not be the exact phrase he uses, but I don’t care enough to look it up and I’ve clarified that I’m paraphrasing, fuck off) his agéd grandmother. So, combining lots of toxic substances – poisons, cleaning supplies, paints, chemicals, engine oil, etc – as well as hair and beauty products, animal medications and some spicy things from the pantry – he boils up a giant saucepan of liquid and feeds it to her.

Rather than killing her dead or requiring immediate medical attention (as would happen if a person were to ingest these substances irl), George’s grandmother instead grows to the height of a house. George then tests the mixture on a chicken and the same thing happens, though this time it also grows proportionally in all directions, making a genuine giant chicken. It then lays a giant egg.

Then, egged on by his parents who come back to the house, George then gives the “medicine” to basically every animal on the farm and they alllll grow to giant size. As a farmer and businessman, the lad’s father then thinks that getting alllll the animals to the size of houses is a great solution to food scarcity (if you – imo erroneously – consider meat a food (it isn’t)) and a guaranteed get-rich scheme.

Unfortunately, though (or fortunately in the long run as giant cows and giant chickens and giant pigs would eventually be a problem for everyone, no?), George has run out of medicine, and though he keeps trying to recreate it, he just can’t manage it, finally giving up after he makes a mixture that shrinks animals down. They give this to the grandmother – who has remained the height of a house throughout these experiments – but she is greedy and necks loads and loads and loads and shrinks so far and so fast that she effectively disappears.

That’s the end of the novel.

I don’t quite know what to make of it. Is it meant to be funny? Is it meant to be thrilling? Is it meant to encourage children to try and make concoctions out of bleach and turmeric and toothpaste and try and slip it to their relatives? Or is it meant to neutralise the risk of this by making it clear to children that magic wouldn’t happen?

Or is it totally neutral? Meant as nothing more less than as a minor distraction for 30 minutes or so (longer if you’re a child learning to read, probably) to pass time, mark time… Change nothing, mean little…

Is it a great work of literature? No, not in my opinion. Is there characterisation? Is there narrative? Is there poetry? Is there a catharsis? Is there allegory? Is there imagery? Is there anything, really, that makes this literature?

I’d argue not. But what do I know? It’s not aimed at me so, like that Pope once said, “Who am I to judge?”.

For me: not marvellous. And definitely not medicine…