Dahl’s sense of characterization is especially keen with the Stag, who gains a kind of mythic steely menace, with his excessive politeness masking some deep rage: “Stuffy noticed that the Stag was being polite. Indeed, these British soldiers buck up and behave like soldiers at all times, stoically equipping themselves for another rescue mission in the midst of what should be a drunken spree.Īnother real appeal of this story is Dahl’s masterful voice, a confident guide to the drunken young men on a gallant mission of slightly debauched heroism.
Yet the horrors themselves are never graphically depicted in "Madame Rosette " unlike Catch 22 there is no maudlin mourning for a lost Snowden, nor is there the MASH-like devolvement to an anarchic sex-and-football escape. These are young men in the prime of their youth who’ve spent months if not years living through graphic horrors. I will not say more, except to say there is no irony laden conclusion, or touch of the macabre, nor do you miss this lack of a twist. They go to her brothel, their moral outrage hardened into a resolve to liberate all the girls they find there.
Stuffy calls her, and indeed she tells him she can get the girl, but his conscience nags at Stuffy, and he cancels the deal.įrom here, the three men roll from bar to bar, interacting with the locals, drinking and watching dancing girls, the idea of Madame Rosette’s livelihood eating away at them, until they decide they have to take action. Stuffy becomes enamored of a shop girl, and the Stag tells him of Madame Rosette, the madame of Cairo, who can get any girl you want in all of Cairo, shopgirl, wife, or what have you – the only difficulty a matter of price. Here they rent a hotel room, take a bath (“They were feeling about having a bath rather how you would feel on the first night of your honeymoon.”) and hit the town, where they pick up Williams, another RAF soldier. They laze about camp conducting scorpion fights and being bored between missions, and then two of them, the Stag and Stuffy, go on leave to Cairo. "Madame Rosette" concerns pilots stationed in North Africa in the early days of World War II. One of these, first published in Harper's in August, 1945, was "Madame Rosette", which may rank with "MASH," and long segments of "Catch 22," as one of the finest black war comedies which does not involve direct combat. Here, he began writing stories about his experiences in the Army. Finally, after crashes that resulted in murderous headaches, he was posted to Washington, D.C. During World War II, he was a pilot in North Africa, flying numerous dangerous missions which wiped out 17 of the 20 pilots in his unit.
His father died when he was four, and a series of harsh English boarding schools notorious for beatings and pederasty left him with a healthy distrust of authority, all of which is on permanent display in his works for adults and children alike.
(The last of these has been filmed numerous times, most recently by Quentin Tarantino as a segment of the movie Four Rooms.)ĭahl was born into a Norwegian family lured to the boomtown of Cardiff in South Wales when it was a capital of coal mining and shipping, around 1911. His best known adult works are "Lamb to the Slaughter," about a woman who clubs her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then feeds the murder weapon to the investigating officers, and "Man from the South," about a compulsive gambler who wagers his own car against the little finger of unsuspecting strangers. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, The Witches – all of these came only after he’d already made a name for himself as the writer of morbidly wicked adult fiction in the late forties and fifties. Roald Dahl came to writing the children’s classics for which he is best known relatively late in his life.