Roald Dahl "Taste and Other Tales"

 

Roald Dahl

All the stories in ‘Taste and Other Tales’ have a wonderfully inventive story line and Roald Dahl’s trademark ‘twist in the tale’. The characters are all A ordinary people on the surface, but have a dark and often cruel side to their nature. Tension is built up around the relationships between the various characters.

The book consist of eight stories: ‘Taste’, ‘A Swim’, ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’, ‘The Way up to Heaven’, ‘The Sound Machine’, ‘The Leg of Lamb’, ‘Birth and Fate’ and ‘Poison’.

In ‘Taste’, what begins as a harmless bet about the name of a wine becomes deadly serious as one man bets his daughter’s future against two houses. When one man is found to have cheated, the other becomes understandably outraged.

A bet on the distance a ship will travel makes Mr Botibol take drastic action in ‘A Swim’. In order to slow the ship down, and win the bet, he jumps overboard in front of an elderly woman, sure that she will raise the alarm. But the old lady doesn’t...

In ‘Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat’, Mrs Bixby escapes from her boring dentist husband every month to be with the Colonel. When the Colonel gives her an expensive mink coat, she realizes that she has to prevent her husband from knowing who it came from so she puts it in a pawnshop. But Mr Mr Bixby goes to the pawnshop instead to collect it. When Mrs Bixby goes to his surgery to collect the coat, he gives her a little fur neckpiece instead. Then his assistant comes in wearing the fur coat. Mr Bixby knows that his wife cannot protest.

In ‘The Way up to Heaven’, Mrs Foster’s terrible fear of being late is cruelly used by her husband to put her into a state of panic. When Mrs Foster leaves for a flight to Paris, she recognises a sound in their apartment. Six weeks later she returns to find the apartment empty and the lift stuck between floors. Where is Mr Foster?

‘The Sound Machine’ tells the story of Klausner’s obssession with sound. He makes a machine that he thinks can hear flowers screaming when they are picked. He tests the machine by cutting a tree with an axe and persuades his doctor to put iodine on the cut...

‘The Leg of Lamb’ tells the story of a possible ‘perfect crime’. When policeman, Patrick Maloney, tells his pregnant wife that he is leaving her, she kills him with a frozen leg of lamb. After getting an alibi by going to her local shops, she invites the investigating policemen to have dinner, and they eat the murder weapon.

In ‘Birth and Fate’, Ida has just given birth to her fourth child, a healthy baby boy. But her three other children have all died young, and Ida is worried that her drunken husband will think that the baby is too small. Mr and Mrs Hitler decide to call their baby – Adolf!

‘Poison’ is a tense story of Harry Pope, a man in bed who says he has a poisonous snake lying on his stomach. Dr Ganderbai gives him some serum and then puts chloroform into the bed to put the snake to sleep. When the sheets are pulled back, Harry jumps up but there is no snake. So why does Harry call the doctor ‘you dirty little rat’?

 

 

  

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