The Witches (book)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| The Witches | |
 1st edition cover |
|
| Author | Roald Dahl |
|---|---|
| Original title | The Witches |
| Illustrator | Quentin Blake |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | children's |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
| Publication date | 1983 |
| Media type | |
| ISBN | 978-0-141-32264-3 |
The Witches is a book for children by Roald Dahl, first published in London in 1983 by Jonathan Cape. The book, like many of Dahl's works, is illustrated by Quentin Blake. Its content has made the book the frequent target of censors. It appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000 at number twenty-seven.[1] The book was also adapted into a stage play.
[edit] Plot
The book's witches, described as "demons in human form", form a well-connected organization which aims to destroy children. No motive is given, other than witches' abhorrence of children. This organisation has branches in every country in the world, and is particularly powerful in Norway, where the origin of witches is said to have been and where, as a result, the witches' operation is known to all. The chapters in different countries are forbidden to communicate, although the witches in each country are generally all friends. Each witch seeks to eliminate at least one child per week.
In a household in Norway, an orphaned boy (the book's narrator) is told by his grandmother how to recognise witches, so that he may avoid them. She tells him stories about five children who fell victim to the evil powers of the witches:
- A girl named Solveg was given an apple by a witch and was trapped inside a painting for the rest of her life;
- A boy named Harald who woke up healthy one morning and had been petrified by the end of the day;
- A girl named Birgit was turned into a chicken and kept as a pet by her family;
- A boy named Leif was turned into a porpoise whilst swimming with his family;
- A girl named Ranghild was led away by a witch and never seen again.
The grandmother describes how to recognize a witch: witches have no hair, and must therefore wear wigs directly on their naked scalps, resulting in a condition they call "wig-rash"; witches have thin, curved, clawlike fingernails that they must disguise with gloves; witches have no toes; a witch's spit is bright blue, leaving a pale bluish film on their teeth; and a witch has unusual pupils in which one may see "fire and ice dancing" in the center. The boy implies also that ghouls and barguests exist, although not as dangerous as witches. The boy is warned by his grandmother of the leader of the witches, the Grand High Witch, the terrifying ruler of all the witches in the world.
The boy then has his first encounter with a witch, when he is playing in his treehouse and spots a strange woman in black staring up at him with an eerie smile. When he sees that she is wearing gloves, he instantly becomes afraid; when the witch offers him a snake (implied to be poisonous) to entice him, he calls for his grandmother, whereupon the witch departs. This persuades the boy and his grandmother to be wary.
When the grandmother later becomes ill, their holiday to Norway is postponed in favor of a time in England. They stay at a luxury hotel, where they discover that the English witches have come to hold their annual meeting. At the annual convention of English witches (ironically disguised as a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children convention), the Grand High Witch, angry at the witches' failure to destroy all of the children in England, unveils a master plan wherein the English witches should purchase sweet shops (using counterfeit banknotes given to them by the Grand High Witch) and give away free chocolate laced with Formula 86 Delayed Action Mouse Maker, a mixture which will change anyone who eats it into a mouse at a specific time. The witches are instructed by the Grand High Witch that the formula will activate at 9:00 a.m. the day after the children have eaten the chocolate, when they are at school. The teachers, she hopes, will panic and kill the mice, thereby doing the witches' work for them.
By chance, the boy is hiding in the convention room at the time, training his pet white mice. He recognizes some characteristics described by his grandmother, and therefore remains hidden whilst the witches unveil their true selves (removing their wigs to reveal chafed, bald scalps, their shoes to reveal toeless feet, their gloves to reveal long, sharp claws, and grinning with their mouths full of blue saliva).
The Grand High Witch turns a fat child named Bruno Jenkins (lured to the convention hall by the promise of free chocolate) into a mouse as a demonstration of her potion. Shortly after, the witches smell the narrator's presence (based on the premise that children smell repulsive to witches) and change him into a mouse by giving him an overdose of the formula.
The transformed boy returns to his grandmother's room, and tells her who he was and what he had heard. They steal a bottle of the witches' potion and pour it into the green pea soup in the kitchen reserved for the witches' dinner. The witches all turn into mice almost instantly, having ingested overdoses. The hotel staff panic and kill all England's witches in their form of mice. The boy and his grandmother then create a plan to use the potion recipe the witches created to attack the Grand High Witch's Norwegian headquarters, hoping to change all remaining witches into mice, release cats into the building to kill them, and then use the Grand High Witch's counterfeit money to fund a mission to repeat the process all over the world.
